the pride of Africa's women entrepreneurs
by Lori Milner
We don't choose to be stressed or anxious. When life gets tough, we often fall back on habits that seem helpful but actually make us more tired and worried. The starting point is to create an awareness of the habits that have a misalignment between intention and impact.
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by Catia Mondlane
Being an entrepreneur is an exciting and challenging journey. However, running a business comes with an additional responsibility: managing your time effectively. Between tasks, meetings, clients, and personal life, it can be difficult to balance everything without feeling overwhelmed. Fortunately, with some practical strategies, it’s possible to optimise your time and increase productivity. Here are some time management tips for busy entrepreneurs.
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by Lori Milner
The real way to harmony is to interrupt the inner conflict between how you would like to spend your time and how you think you should be spending it. I am not here to provide a magic formula to create harmony with how you divide your time. However, I can gift you ten questions from Oliver Burkeman's book, Four Thousand Weeks, which provide some thought-provoking questions to help you determine what matters for you now. I say now because these choices will ultimately change based on life stage, circumstances and values, which are constantly evolving.
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by Lori Milner
Consider how you feel when you perceive that you have wasted your time versus used it efficiently; it's not really about the quantity of time available but the choices you make on how to invest it that create the illusion of harmony. Unfortunately, it's not that simple. Even when you enjoy what you're doing, you may feel guilty because you feel like you should be working on something else.
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by Anja van Beek, Talent Strategist, Leadership & HR Expert and Executive Coach
In recent years, the landscape of HR has undergone a significant transformation. We have seen a shift from routine HR processes being automated for People leaders to focus on the culture and other strategic focus areas in the business. When we look at the future of work, we can expect to see more integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in People/HR teams to build experienced worthy initiatives.
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by Anja van Beek, Talent Strategist, Leadership & HR Expert and Executive Coach
Have you ever calculated how many of your 24hrs you are in “work-mode” – whether thinking, doing, or responding to a quick mail at a family braai? I have noticed that many people, at one point or another, struggle to find time to cope with the demands of modern-day life, especially as we are surrounded by technology. The reality is that leaders also need to fill their own cup. Many of my clients say they feel overwhelmed by what we need to do and achieve in a day. They also say, “there is just not enough time in one day” (sounds familiar?) and sometimes they even feel run-down, frustrated or anxious.
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by Lori Milner
Questions are a conduit to unlocking the resources within you. They are an essential coaching tool because they are a permission device between what someone already knows and what they want to acknowledge. Change happens when a client reaches a new insight, a perspective they never considered previously. However, the insight can only reveal itself when the person is completely honest with themselves.
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by Lori Milner
If you want to make sure you come out on your monthly salary, you plan and budget accordingly. Why not apply the same thinking to your time and create a time budget? Creating a budget for your spending is not a punishment but a way to give you peace of mind. Managing your day should be the same. Your calendar is your budgeting tool - plan your week before you are in it to allocate sufficient funds to the relevant tasks. The last thing you want is to run out of time and then eat into next week's allocation.
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by Tapiwa Matsinde
Busyness and working hard are often aligned with an assumption of making progress. That, however, isn’t always the case. In fact, they could be doing just the opposite by lulling you into a false sense of productivity and distracting you from nurturing the specific tasks that are moving your business forward.
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by Marjon Meyer
Procrastination can become a lifestyle. A very unsatisfactory one, in fact. It makes us feel guilty and unaccomplished. Are you a last-minute.com expert? To be honest, I have been delaying – thus procrastinating – writing this article. My life has a renewed sense of busyness after living slow during the pandemic. There are several tasks on my to-do list that evade getting done … they even haunt me at times.
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by Lori Milner
If you could stop one habit today, what would it be? As a professional coach and trainer, I have asked this question in hundreds of workshops, and without fail, the one habit that always comes up consistently is procrastination. Procrastination is the habit of putting off something until later. When you repeat this habit on a consistent basis, it becomes detrimental not only to your productivity but also to your emotional state. Feelings of self-hatred, self-criticism, judgement and fear taunt you when you’re at you’re lowest.
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by Safiyyah Boolay-Jappie
Avoidance is one of the more sinister patterns that we adopt. Firstly, by avoiding the discomfort we’re trying to escape, we ironically make it permanent in our lives. Secondly, as a function of avoidance, we make our power to improve our situation invisible to ourselves. We make the cycle of pain and avoidance perpetual and even permanent for ourselves.
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by Lori Milner
“Your day is determined by a thought you had this morning” – Dandapani
What is your default thought when you wake up? Oh, another day to get through! First you may hit snooze a few times and then ask yourself the same question. This matters because it is the theme song you are planting into your mind which will dictate your entire day.
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By Safiyyah Boolay-Jappie
Life is busy, and days pass by in a flash. Often, I reach the end of the day wondering what the heck happened! It is the most disorienting feeling to know that one has been not just busy, but frantically consumed by activity, and yet we are unable to account for our time and we have made no progress on our own goals.
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by Thobile Nyawo
Invest time now and not tomorrow. The saying that “time and tide wait for no man” means different things to different people. To some, it is precious and important while to many others, it is common and available when the need arises. The right essence of time is really in the doing and not in the waiting. A time spent in doing something worthwhile always comes back fruitfully. What cannot be allocated time is indeed not worth doing. Certainly, a person who invests time reading and writing is expected to acquire sound knowledge and writing skills. Time is life. He who wastes time has not only wasted life but has also injured eternity. A person who wastes time in doing nothing will eventually end up being nothing. There is no two ways about that.
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by Usha Maharaj
It is no secret that during the last month of the year most of us struggle to stay motivated and productive at work. Some of us may feel the added pressure of family visiting, feel intimidated by shopping for gifts, and disheartened by tight deadlines before the office closes for the year.
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by Lori Milner
“Slow down and everything you are chasing will come around and catch you.” – John De Paola
I’m sure at some point in your life, you have come across the dreaded ‘scope creep’. If you’ve ever done a building or renovation project, I’m quite sure things didn’t quite come in on the original budget. There was ‘just this’ one last thing that you hadn’t taken into consideration. Or a project at work had much more involved than you originally anticipated and left you scrambling to try and produce more for the same resources.
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Think about what is important!…
Marta Roff, co-founder, Maputo Relocation Solutions (Mozambique)
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Saajidah Esat, Freelancer & Writer, (Zimbabwe)
Saajidah Esat, Freelancer & Writer, (Zimbabwe)
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Adenike 'Nike' Ogunlesi, founder of Ruff 'n' Tumble, Nigeria
On finding strength in the difficult times....
- Adenike 'Nike' Ogunlesi is the founder of Ruff 'n' Tumble a leading designer, manufacturer and retailer of designer children's clothing in Nigeria. Nike started out modestly in 1996 selling the clothes she made from the boot of her car and in bazaars. Today, Ruff 'n' Tumble is an instantly recognisable brand in Nigeria and has a reputation for being one of the top manufacturers of children's clothing throughout West Africa. Ruff 'n' Tumble successfully caters to the unique fashion sense of today’s youngsters, from new born to age 16, happily mixing indigenous lifestyle trends with an international appeal.
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