I Sit Down at 8:30am. I Look Up and It’s 3:30pm.

I don’t know where the day goes. When I am working at home by myself in the business I own and run, I sit down at my computer at 8:30 am, coffee in hand, ready to face the day. Twenty minutes later, I look up and it’s 3:30pm and my kids are on their way home, chaos in tow. Every day I ask myself, “What exactly did I accomplish today?”

There are so many ways that your time can get sucked into a black hole when you are working for yourself. If you’re building a business on your own, your time is literally everything you have, and every day is a lesson in how finite that resource is.

Tell me if this sounds familiar: you think to yourself, “Oh, I’m just going to set up this thing in Calendly,” and it takes twenty minutes when it should’ve taken two, because you’re trying to do something you haven’t done before.

Or you’re working on a project with Claude and it recommends a certain quiz software (because you need a quiz to generate qualified leads), so you have to sign up for that tool, but first you have to create an account and then you have to learn their interface, and holy sh*t, you look at the clock and realize you’re about to do your first LinkedIn Live tomorrow and you’ve never done one of those before and you have to shift gears to make sure you’ll be able to capture those video assets correctly so you can make clips in Descript, but how do I do that again?

(Hot Tip: use Riverside to broadcast live to LinkedIn for the most flexible assets in post-production)

You’ve been adapting to new tech your whole career (I see you Gen Xers) but with the addition and promise of AI, we’re learning and changing our workflows on a near-constant basis.

And that’s just the tech.

Then there’s the challenge of building business relationships IRL, which for me, has always been a critical part of my professional success. But I live in Los Angeles, so if I want to have a networking lunch with somebody, it better be really worth it — I live in the Valley, it takes forty-five minutes to get anywhere, an hour and a half for lunch, forty-five minutes home. So I run a ruthless calculation: if the person I’m meeting with isn’t worth an investment of three hours — almost half of my working day — it’s inefficient and should probably be a Zoom. Ouch.

I think about all the time I spent in back-to-back meetings and schmoozy lunches, day after day, across my twenty years in corporate media — that was how things got done. But in those jobs, I was working on a clear mandate and I had a team of other people pushing towards the same KPIs. I had people to delegate to and external partners working on projects on my company’s behalf. We had scale. I had time.

If you’re building a business on your own, your time is literally everything you have, and every day is a lesson in how finite that resource is.

A lot of professional women in midlife are pursuing self-employment because we trust ourselves to work effectively without a boss, we have meaningful expertise to offer, ageism is real, and we’re eager to escape the controlling business cultures that we came up in. We are seeking sovereignty, at least to the extent that we don’t want to have to beg permission to take a sick kid to a doctor’s appointment ever again.

But with sovereignty comes a profound need for efficiency and time management.

And one of the reasons we started Broad Collective was that we were tired of networking groups that were more like country clubs — a favor-ocracy where certain members gain some kind of insider status and trade on access to connections and resources.

We wanted the rooms of Broad Collective to be an ongoing mastermind where members are actually working on solving practical problems together. And what we’re finding is that it’s a tremendous time-saver to learn what tools and techniques are actually helping our peers build their businesses in real time. When you’re building something of your own, on your own, every minute you can reclaim in your already jam-packed day is priceless.

Women entrepreneurs in midlife: how do you manage your time now that you are the marketing team, the IT department, the graphic designer and every other team member rolled into one?

Love,

Erin