Lauren and I are featured in a current article in BC Business Magazine, entitled “What Women Want”. The article touches on many subjects near and dear to our hearts like the growth of female entrepreneurs in the business sector (Canadian women are starting 4 out of every 5 new business in the country) and defining success on your own terms. We’re featured in the article as owners of Raised Eyebrow Web Studio Inc. as well as for the book. I hope I don’t come off as too ego-driven if I say it’s well worth a read.
(And a special shout out to the article’s author Dorothy Bartoszewski, thanks darlin!)
E-day is here in the U.S., and I feel compelled to leave a brief note of encouragement to any U.S. citizen who happens to pause and read it today. Today is a huge opportunity. Your right to vote is precious. Please, please use it.
We have friends who are fighting the good fight today, who have been traveling from state to state, county to county registering voters for months, and who are at polling stations today doing important work like reporting on broken voting machines, advocating for disenfranchised voters, and the like. My heart is full of love and pride for each of these powerful, energetic, and devoted souls.
I don’t think I’ve ever been this excited about an American election. My allegiance will not surprise anyone who knows the slightest bit about my politics, or my personality for that matter: I’m behind Obama all the way. I want him to be the next president. I want to see what happens when you infuse a nation with the power of hope and belief in themselves, when a community organizer becomes the country’s leader.
I also want to see the Obama Hustle become the victory dance:
I’m sending love, patience (for long lineups), faith and courage to everyone in the U.S. today. Your big day is here - time to bring it on home!
(P.S.Steven Heller wrote a very cool blog post today on America’s first-ever woman presidential candidate, Belva Ann Lockwood, who ran for office in 1884 and 1888. It’s short and fascinating — go read it!)
We’re thrilled to announce that we’ll be doing a book signing at the Urban Craft Uprising in Seattle on December 6th (the show is both the 6th & 7th). I spent some time last night reviewing (and getting totally lost in) the simply awesome list of vendors for the show and I’m pretty sure I’ll be doing most of my holiday shopping while we’re there.
We really love taking trips down to Seattle, and I’ve often thought about coming down to check out this show after seeing photos and reports of it from Megan. If you’re going to be there too let us know, we’d love to meet you! And remember, The Boss of You makes the perfect holiday gift for everyone on your list ;)
A great article over at the Etsy blog today about a husband and wife crafty team who moved to Amsterdam and have built up a craft business that has allowed them both to quit their day jobs and create a crafty empire. Now I may just find this a compelling little read because I occasionally fantasize about doing the exact same thing, but I think beyond my Dutch living aspirations it is a great success story. Some great advice on building an online business (or in particular an Esty business), DIY marketing and thoughts on taking the plunge from “day job” to fulltime Etsy entrepreneur.
(By the way if you’re looking for “quit your day job” inspiration, the Etsy blog actually has a whole category of blog posts on the topic).
It was Thanksgiving up here in Canada a week or so ago, and I had meant to post something here about gratitude. I’ve been procrastinating because things are very, very busy at our happy little web studio. But I feel compelled to leave a little thank-you note here to each of you.
Thank you for reading our blog. Thank you for buying our book. Thank you to each of you who has given a copy to a friend, recommended it on your blog, or talked it up to your local bookstore. Thank you for sending us words of encouragement when we were writing; for posting kind reviews on Amazon; for emailing us to tell us that you liked the bit about defining success for yourself, or the chapter on networking.
Thank you to each one of you. Each one of you was a muse of sorts to us; we wrote with you in mind, and you kept us going when we were on the verge of losing faith in what has turned out to be the longest single project we’ve ever tackled together (excepting of course the above-mentioned web studio, and our friendship). It has been enormously wonderful — a genuine dream come true — to find that you really do exist, that our belief that there were other entrepreneurs like us in the world was well-founded, and that we could contribute something, small though it may be, to the community that has inspired us and given us so much.
Thank you, thank you, thank you from the bottom of my heart.
When we were in Seattle for The Lab at Velocity Design back in July, we had the great pleasure of meeting the fabulous Kristen Rask of Schmancy Toys, who is just as cool as you would expect her to be. Turns out Kristen has joined forces with four other Seattle biz ladies who are starting up a new group, which they’re calling the Grassroots Business Association. Their first meetup is next Wednesday, October 22nd, and the full details are posted below.
Sigh… So many cool things happening in Seattle. Someone should really invent a transporter beam so that we could bypass the stupid border lineups.
We would like to invite you to a special event…
What:
Meet and Greet for Grassroots Business Association.
When:
Oct. 22nd, 6 p.m.
Where:
Vermillion, 1508 11th Ave, Seattle, WA, 98122 , www.vermillionseattle.com - Vermillion offers both food and drinks.
What again?:
Thinking of starting a small business? Already got one and looking for some comradeship? Come and meet the founding members of the Grassroots Business Association and let us know what it is you would like to learn about building a small business. We are just starting to form this organization so your input will help shape our organization!
More about us:
Grassroots Business Association is a group of small business owners working on forming a non profit organization for both aspiring and current small business owners. Our purpose is to: educate, inspire, empower, network and support people pursuing an independent career path.
We want to provide an opportunity both for individuals who are just starting to think of pursuing their own business and for current owners who are looking for community support, resources and opportunities.
We would like to be inclusive of all different forms of small businesses: crafters, web designers, graphic designers, artists, boutique and gallery owners, catering businesses, wedding and party coordinators, clothing labels, bookkeepers, career advisers. Basically any type of business that includes you being the boss!
Our goals for the organization are to:
Hold monthly gatherings to socialize and network. Opportunities to get and give advice and feedback. Many small business owners work from home offices and are isolated from their peers.
Special events, i.e. readings by authors such as Lauren Bacon & Emira Mears of “The Boss of You” a book about how to run and maintain a small business.
Educational workshops and classes such as: legal and tax issues on setting up your business, how to set up QuickBooks, Start and maintain a blog, How to get press, and many more.
Hey there smart blog readers. Anybody out there know of a super awesome resource for HR Policies for a small business? Awesome books that helped you with yours? Useful websites chock-full of info and possibly some basic templates? If you know of anything of the sort, please share!
When I logged on to my computer last Monday, I had over five hundred emails in my inbox. Let me clarify: that’s just my work address I’m talking about. I keep separate email addresses for personal use and for Boss of You business, and those had full inboxes, too.
Why the pileup? I had taken two weeks of vacation. That’s all. I had notified my clients I would be away, so very few of those emails were regarding active projects. And my spam filters were working just fine. It was simply an accumulation of two weeks’ worth of normal, everyday mail.
It took me several hours to sort through it all, and I was in triage mode, deleting many messages (such as newsletters) unread. By the end of the day I was dazed — and appalled by how little I had got done.
And I came to a brutal realization: email was killing my productivity. This was not just a one-time fluke; every day I was subjecting myself to a miniature version of this soul-sucking process of reviewing way more emails than I could reasonably respond to. And it wasn’t just email, either: throw in RSS feeds, Facebook and Twitter, and the amount of input I try to process becomes daunting, to say the least.
Coincidentally, in the midst of my first-day-back-from-vacation chaos, I came across Beth Kanter’s quiz on information overload. I recognized myself immediately, and realized that what I was dealing with was not an email problem, but a problem of how to process increasing amounts of input effectively and efficiently.
So I am making some changes. And I want to share them because I believe this issue is a common one among entrepreneurs, who by definition wear many hats and have busy schedules. I’ll try and keep this brief in an effort to reduce your information overload, so here’s a quick list of specific actions that have improved my clarity of mind:
Unsubscribe, unsubscribe, unsubscribe (and repeat): I removed myself from dozens of email newsletters. I took my inspiration from a recent closet purge, where I rid myself of anything I hadn’t worn in a year — in this case, if I didn’t either use the information contained within (i.e. act on it) or love the content, I unsubscribed. This meant saying goodbye to some email updates for causes I support, but that simply don’t make it into my list of top priorities, so it wasn’t easy. But it’ll make room for me to read the stuff I do get more carefully. (Some were easier to say goodbye to, like the newsletters published by stock photo sites. Yawn.)
Move stuff to personal email: In some cases, I couldn’t bring myself to unsubscribe, but I knew the email content was not immediately relevant to my work life. So I moved some stuff over to my personal email account, where I don’t feel guilty about sifting through things more slowly.
Reduce RSS subscriptions: Here I was pretty ruthless, because I have an on-again, off-again relationship with my RSS reader — so I often log in to find hundreds (or thousands) of unread items. I purged the holy hell out of my RSS subscriptions, including some (hello, Apartment Therapy) I love but that simply publish way more stuff than I can actually read.
Switch non-urgent emails to RSS: Next, I got a little more fine-grained, and reviewed my remaining email subscriptions to see if any of them would be better suited to RSS. The key question for me here is, “Do I want the publisher to push the content to me, or do I prefer to go find it when I’m ready?” There were more than a few cases where I felt I’d rather access it when I’m reviewing my RSS headlines, rather than being disrupted by a “new mail message” alert.
Convert emails in my inbox to actions: I had deleted and unsubscribed with abandon, but I still had a crapload of emails to deal with in my inbox. They ranged from time-sensitive client requests to old, old emails I’d held onto to remind me to look into something or other someday. It was time to review each email and determine exactly what the action was I needed to take. (For those of you on theGTD bandwagon, this’ll be an all-too-familiar concept.) Once I got through them all, I had a small inbox and a long (but much more easily parsed) to-do list. My inbox became far less onerous, and my to-do list now reflected all the things that had previously been held in the back of my mind.
Use other technology to store data: There’s a lot of stuff I had got into the habit of tracking and storing via email, even though I knew damn well it was not the best medium for it. For example, I frequently sent myself links to things when I didn’t have time to read them right away, or when I wanted to be able to access them from outside the office. Another example is event invitations - rather than plugging the event right into my calendar I’d hold onto the email. I’m determined to drop this habit. My helper apps are: OmniFocus (for personal task management… I *love* this app so much I want to marry it), Ma.gnolia (for social bookmarking), and a couple of awesome Firefox plugins: Read it Later (which lets you save pages to read later) and Foxmarks (which lets you synchronize your bookmarks on multiple computers). I use my iPhone as my calendar now (a big step as I was a long-time holdout with paper calendars), and I’ve got OmniFocus for iPhone which is so awesome it makes my little head spin with joy — but I don’t count either of those as essential to my productivity.
Once I’d made my way through my work inbox, I took the same approach with my personal email. I use Gmail as my personal email client, and I had been really lazy about archiving emails, so my inbox had a ridiculous number of messages in it. Step 1 was to mass-archive several hundred old, read emails that were cluttering up the scene, and from there the other steps were the same: unsubscribe, and convert emails to actions.
If you can’t find time to do all of the above in one fell swoop, don’t fret; it’s taken me a week to get through them. Try taking one step a day, and see where you get to. In fact, definitely DON’T try and do this all at once; that would defeat the purpose. Your goal here is to reduce overwhelm, not add to it. Do a little, then sit back and admire your handiwork — or better yet, step away from the computer and do something much more fun.
We *heart* Michelle Goodman, author of The Anti 9-to-5 Guide. She’s smart, funny, and a source of incredibly solid, down-to-earth career advice. You know those women’s magazine career columns where they fixate on office politics, what to eat during staff lunches, and dressing for success? Michelle’s writing is the complete opposite of that junk; she focuses on what really matters.
When we were working on The Boss of You, Michelle became not just an admired author but a friend — and she generously shared her tips on writing, editing, and marketing a book with us. And we ate up every morsel she fed us, because she’s one of those rare creatures who actually makes a living as a writer. (Believe you me, that’s no easy task.)
So it makes perfect sense that Michelle’s second book, which came out October 1st, is a kick-ass guidebook for freelancers. Listen up, all you freelance types: you won’t want to miss this book. We’ve had the honour of scanning a review copy, and it’s really, really good. We’re not just saying that because we know and love Michelle, either — we’re saying it because the world needs more books like this, and we know a lot of you are doing the freelance thing and could use some advice that’s geared specifically to you. So check out My So-Called Freelance Life: How to Survive and Thrive as a Creative Professional for Hire. You won’t regret it.
And hey, if you’re in the Seattle area, why not meet Michelle in person? You can head to the book launch party on Thursday, October 16th, or go to Elliott Bay Book Company on Saturday, October 25th. Details on both events here.
There are so many awesome local business groups for the entrepreneurial gal in search of camaraderie and support. The Austin based, Babes in Business, just came across on my Twitter Feed (thanks to Craft Magazine’s awesome Twitter missives). Babes in Business is a Yahoo Group that meets once a month in Austin. It is run by Anne Marie Beard, and was set up by the lovely Jennifer Perkins. I know there are plenty of other groups like this around the planet (networking and support groups for us business girls), if you know of another/belong to one in your community, post it in the comments so others can find local resources.
Facebook afficionados, join us: we’ll be posting events, discussion topics, and more on our Facebook page. Become a fan of our book and we'll keep you posted on all things Boss of You.
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So it makes perfect sense that Michelle’s second book, which came out October 1st, is a kick-ass guidebook for freelancers. Listen up, all you freelance types: you won’t want to miss this book. We’ve had the honour of scanning a review copy, and it’s really, really good. We’re not just saying that because we know and love Michelle, either — we’re saying it because the world needs more books like this, and we know a lot of you are doing the freelance thing and could use some advice that’s geared specifically to you. So check out 
