Fuelled by Coffee

  11 Agenda Items you can use to plan your business week When we are working for an employer or as part of a team, meetings often serve as touchstones for actions and activities. They help with brainstorming new ideas and solutions and, if recorded, they provide a reminder of tasks which need doing and can even celebrate wins. So what do you do when you work for yourself, are your own boss, and maybe don’t have employees or a team – you hold meetings with yourself! Don’t laugh … it works really well. Have regular meetings with yourself -  it works really well! Having regular meetings with yourself helps you focus on what’s important. You can set an agenda, follow through and follow up the next week to see what you’ve achieved. You can set goals, itemise the steps you need to take to get to the end and record how you did. The notes will help you reflect and serve as a bit of a road map, as well as a good aid to your memory if you want to do a similar project again. Do...

My house hippo reminds me to get on with it! I’ve turned procrastination into an Olympic event, so I can tell you, from my heart, that getting what you need to get done is often harder than it looks on paper. I work from home, so have to be my own cheerleader, boss and accountability ‘partner’, so I have come up with a number of ways to get my head into my work and get stuff done. One of the techniques I use to overcome my tendency to procrastinate is to switch my mind away from the task I am meant to do, and do something briefly, which will get my brain motivated and into work. Set a timer for 10 minutes and ONLY work until the timer rings. Then stop – refocus – and get on with the job you have been putting off. I’m going to share seven quick small jobs which you can choose from to kickstart your motivation! The trick is not to linger over them, even if they look like they’ll take longer than the time you give given them – when the timer rings – just stop! You weren’t going ...

  There’s a war out there. A war for jobs, space for new businesses and for confidence. For older women leaving the workforce, for whatever reason, their confidence in themselves as dynamic people with abilities and ideas has often been eroded. We don’t realise it, of course. We drift into ageing without a backward glance. We’ve been so brainwashed into thinking that the third stage of life will be filled by lattes with friends, golf, and the occasional shopping trip. Time to rest and relax the brochures say. Time to be yourself and get off the work treadmill. But what if you don’t want to step off the treadmill. What if you’ve had dreams of running your own business, being entrepreneurial, independent and meaningfully busy? I’m a self-styled Silverpreneur. I have grey/silver hair, am the wrong side of the official ‘retirement’ age for women and I’ve been running my own business for the past ten years – and very successfully too, thank you very much! Being older and likel...

I've been thinking about Kaizen and how I apply it to my business processes This week, I’ve been thinking about Kaizen – the Japanese approach to improvement or change for the better – some business places may know this better as ‘continuous improvement’, but it is also a word meaning ‘small changes’ for optimal results. There are five traditional elements to the practice of Kaizen which include teamwork, personal discipline, improved morale, quality circles and suggestions for improvement. But I see it as a whole practice which looks at ways to improve our workflow or work practices to achieve the best outcome – and we do this by taking small steps towards our end goal. Sometimes we must also look at improving single steps towards our goals more than once in order to perfect that step. Kaizen has been used successfully by many major businesses and there are plenty of examples if you fancy a Google search, but in simple terms the practice can be used in our own small busine...

  How I spent 2021 as an introverted business woman I’m an introvert and proud of it! Having my wanderings cut back because of the pandemic in the past couple of years has both saved me money – less spending on fuel, which can be costly when you live in a rural or regional area, and also a saving on accommodation, food and random shopping – and it has also saved my sanity a little bit. As an introvert I sometimes get overwhelmed at large gatherings and need time to decompress. These past months of cancelled conferences and curtailed activities has given me time to take a much-needed breath. Since I started my business nearly 10 years ago, I have been on the go almost constantly. If I haven’t been travelling and attending courses to increase my skills and knowledge, I’ve been travelling to present workshops or consult with clients. Taking some of that action off the table has been wonderful for me – sorry everyone! But I’m just about over it now and ready to re-enter the wor...