About Eleanor Mayrhofer

Eleanor Mayrhofer is a recent escapee of Cubicle Nation. She currently blends her love of design, the expertise she gained in her professional career and her enthusiasm for small enterprise through e.m.papers, her download-and-print stationery business.

December 20, 2011

walking the talk


A couple of posts ago I talked about doing less, better. Indeed, I am going to follow my own advice and bring several of the projects that aren’t part of my core business scope to a close this year.

The Steal This Process series has been a lot of fun. It helped me consolidate, define and express what I’ve learned over the years about project management, and share it with a group of people that are close to my heart: creatives and indie business owners.

As I look back over what I accomplished in 2011 and what I want  to get done in 2012, one thing is clear: this year needs to be about e.m.papers only. So to that end, I’m going to be wrapping up my series here on Scoutie Girl.

Through the fall I had to make a decision. Did I want to do more with Steal this Process? Like give more workshops and/or turn it into an e-course – which I think would be great, and there would probably be a lot of demand for.

Then, I had the incredible good fortune of getting contacted – out of the blue – by magazine editors in both Germany and the US for major publications. Wonderful news, but I realized that I needed to get a lot done around product development and shop improvements to reap whatever benefits the publicity brings.

I realized that I had gone out on some tangents this year, and would have been more prepared if I had stuck to working on just e.m.papers.  For a couple of days I was really mad at myself for not staying 110% focused on business.

But I remembered that sometimes the path to a goal is not always straight.

There is no denying how much my life was enriched and my experience deepened by following my heart a little more than my high level plan in 2011.

But now it’s time to get back down to brass tacks and focus on e.m.papers exclusively.  I want to thank everyone who has read and/or commented on my posts. The feedback from this community has been an encouragement and an inspiration. I feel honored to have been a contributor. I look forward to continued sustenance as a Scoutie Girl reader in 2012!

As part of my Steal This Process ‘wind down’ I’ve decided to permanently reduce the cost of the Steal This Process kit, it is now just $27. Scoutie Girl readers can get another 25% off until Christmas day with this code: sgprocess

I wish you a joyful and productive 2012!

Filed Under: Steal This Process Tagged With: , , , , , , 5 Comments
December 7, 2011

your 2011 ‘I Did’ List

Hello You're Awesome from Red Velvet Press

As the year closes we are all busy – busy going into the holiday season and busy thinking about next year. It’s all too easy to think about the things we want to improve and do better in 2012.

In the rush to optimize, tweak, improve, and maybe completely overhaul the way we are doing things, it’s important to take a moment and reflect and congratulate ourselves on all the things we did right and even the things that we tried but could have done better.

Before you sharpen your pencils or fire up your laptop to create a plan of attack for 2012, take some time to make an ‘I did’ list for 2011.

Resist the urge to critique, scold, or berate yourself for things you didn’t get to; you can tackle that stuff (if you wish) next year.

You’ll probably be surprised by all of the things you got done. This will feel good. It’s so easy to keep our sights on the next accomplishment, goal, or milestone that we forget how far we have come.

Give yourself a high-five, a bubble bath, a pedicure, or whatever you do to do treat yourself.

Being creative is hard. Running a small business is hard. What we’re doing here takes guts.

The sense of accomplishment and pride this little exercise generates will restore you, help you enter 2012 with a sense of your own competence, and give you the boost you need to tackle all your new plans with gusto and confidence.

Filed Under: Steal This Process Tagged With: , , , , , , , , 20 Comments
November 23, 2011

do less, better


I’ve mentioned before that goal setting is not as easy as it looks. Understanding what to do and why to do it involves a lot of deep thinking and reflection. I’m in the midst of defining my 2012 goals, and it’s not easy.

One thing I’ve learned about setting goals is that it’s a good idea not to over do it.

Each goal generates projects, on average maybe 3-5 projects. If you set 3 goals for yourself, you’re looking at around 9-15 projects. These are projects that need to be executed at the same time while running your business, considering that 9-15 projects is a lot.

Another reason not to overdo it with the amount of goals you set is to allow for the unexpected.

Unexpected projects are a part of life in business and will happen. Let me share an example of one from my own business that I’m dealing with right now.

I am in the middle of optimizing my e.m.papers website. We are working with a developer and consultant to launch a big Adwords campaign. While the site has been doing well – revenue is increasing month over month from last year – sales have kind of plateaued, thus the campaign.

The consultant pointed out a lot of optimization issues on the site that really should be fixed before we run the ads. Some of the issues are technical, many are user experience related. This was more than a little embarrassing since I worked for several years as a UE consultant! The problems were obvious and fixing them will have a big impact on conversion rates.

These are things I have to fix NOW. Most engagements happen between Thanksgiving and Valentine’s day; it’s the height of wedding stationery purchasing season and putting them off until spring or summer is not an option. So I find myself in the middle of a site refresh effort that I didn’t plan for. I wanted to spend this time developing new products, but now that will have to wait.

I hate surprise projects and scope. Once my frustration with myself subsided I thought about how this happened. The answer was clear: I’ve just been trying to do too much. This has resulted in my neglecting some very basic things.

Later, while riding my bike (which in some ways is akin to thinking in the shower) the phrase ‘Do less, better’ came to me. This is my motto for 2012.

Unexpected projects will happen. Creating a small set of focused goals will allow for space to deal with these surprises more effectively in the future.

Filed Under: Steal This Process Tagged With: , , , , , 6 Comments
November 9, 2011

what do i want? what am i doing? and why?

Sunset at Varkala by Koshy Koshy

As the weather turns cold and the leaves fall from the trees, we start to reflect on the previous year and set our sights on the coming one. To reflect and review is a natural, cyclical impulse.

We do ourselves a favor when we stop to assess what we set out to do and why we are doing it and to discern whether or not it still makes sense.

If you haven’t already, take some time to look back on goals, lists and plans you made for 2011 and take a moment to ask:

Your goals: What were the reasons, desires or drivers behind the goals I set? Are they still relevant? How have they changed?

Your scope: Did the projects I set for myself accomplish my goals? Were/are there other things I should/could be doing to accomplish them? Where did I get side tracked? Conversely, did I miss opportunities because I stuck too rigidly to the task at hand?

Estimations and plans: Were the time frames I gave myself realistic? Did I give myself enough time? Not enough? Was I able to have some semblance of balance between work, life, family and everything else? Did I slack too much?

Going through these questions isn’t just an exercise to go through at the end of the year, but a few times throughout it. A good rule of thumb is to review your goals at least twice a year. If you have set up your projects and scope and are planning monthly and weekly you will have a sort of built in defacto review.

Taking a moment every few months to take a step back and ask the above questions while you’re planning will keep you from going too far down a path which may have made sense when you set your goals, but no longer does.

This is harder than it looks.

Life is not static; opportunities arise and must be seized – charts, plans and to-do lists be damned! On the other hand, we don’t want to jump at each bright, shiny object that crosses our path.

I am wrestling with this right now. I look at the past year and can say that I have accomplished much. A lot of these things, however, had nothing to do directly with my business. I did this knowingly and for reasons that were sound, but I fought with myself the entire time.

For example, my Hello Etsy! talk, these posts, and my Steal This Process Project and Time Management Kit were waaaay out of scope. In fact, the whole thing was an effort to get the word out about e.m.papers, ha! But it gathered momentum and took on a life of its own and has been a deeply gratifying project.

Having said that, in the coming year I want to do a better job of really focusing on a few key goals and making sure I prune back unrelated extraneous activities, no matter how enticing new opportunities may seem. But I also don’t want to lose sight of the fact that sometimes the surest path to a goal is not always a straight line.

This involves discipline and a lot of soul searching to answer the questions: What do I want? Why? Will what I’m doing help me get where I want to go? Reviewing helps us figure this out.

‘What do I want?’ and ‘Why’ are the alpha and omega between reviewing and defining goals. Reviewing sounds easy, but it’s not. Make sure not to skip or gloss over this important step.

P.S. As the link above points out, The Steal This Process Kit is now available and ready for download. It’s a 60+ page guide book plus a slew of templates (in both Excel or PDF formats) that walk through and help you implement the concepts I’ve been sharing here and in my workshop, which you can now view here. The kit is 20% off until Friday, November 11; use the code: earlybirdspecial. Thanks so much to all of you who have already signed up to the mailing list!

Filed Under: Steal This Process Tagged With: , , , , , , , , 6 Comments
October 26, 2011

Reviewing: the final step

Phew. Now that we covered the hard work of executing, it’s time to focus on the last step in the six steps of project management: Reviewing.

Reviewing is a way of ‘coming up for air’ as you’re busily driving towards your goals. When you review you revisit your goals, your scope, your plan to check progress and confirm that you’re on track (or not, and if so, why?) as well as determine whether or not your goals, scope, plans and estimate still make sense.

Reviewing is important for two reasons. The first one is that life is not static and goals and projects may need to change. The second reason is that sometimes reviewing helps us gage if we’re still on track; and if we’re not prompts us to take measures to remedy the situation.

It’s important to strike a balance between rigidly ‘sticking to plan’ and making course corrections and adjustments as we get new information. You may find that working towards a certain goal does not bring you as much joy or revenue than you originally thought. Perhaps a you find a project is going to take twice as long as your originally thought. That’s okay, the only thing that is constant is change.

We plan, God laughs.

You will usually get an organic sense of when it’s time to go back over to review and rework items from your goals and scope to estimation and your low level plan. The key thing to remember is that it’s best to strike a balance between totally forgetting about everything and reworking it too much and too often.

We’ll look at some rules of thumb for reviewing each item in the next post.

Filed Under: Steal This Process Tagged With: , , , , , Leave a Comment