Women are multi-dimensional managers! In addition to being deeply involved in the operations of companies that they either own or work for, many of us are also dealing with the coordination of the responsibilities of home, family, church and in some cases, care of elderly or ill family members.
This is why I found myself laughing as a read a “serious” Forbes article yesterday on the state of women-owned businesses in 2017. It pointed out that while there has been a steady increase in the number of women starting own businesses over the past three years, the productivity and profitability of women-owned business develops at a much slower pace when contrasted to businesses started by men. They speculated all the various reasons like networking and lack of capital.
So many hats, so little time!
This is where I started laughing. I laughed because I was thinking, “So many hats, so little time!”
I agree that access to capital and contacts are important, but it seems to me that some obvious factors were being overlooked. The challenges we face as women are more complex because the scope of our responsibilities is more complex. We are multi-dimensional managers. If we could maximize the ease and effectiveness of our busy days we just might be able to see more growth in our businesses and peace in our lives.
How to do that? I am certainly not an expert in this area. But one thing that I am trying to do is rethink the way I approach my day. I saw this video once, on time management. The workshop participants were given a task of fitting several big rocks and a pile of marbles of various sizes into a glass vase. Well, despite the urging of the workshop leader that this could be done, no one was having success getting everything to fit in the vase. Especially the big rocks.
Then, the workshop leader demonstrated that if you put the big rocks in first, all of the little marbles could go in and shift around in the vase. Poof! Everything fit. To me the big rocks symbolize those very high priority tasks.
What are your Big Rock Priorities?
Early in my career those rocks would have been work projects. But at this stage of my life, I decided that my prayer life and family life are my Big Rocks! So I am working on making sure that as I plan those things into my schedule first and then schedule my work and leisure activities around those.