Fashion Business Owner Musings: The Challenge of Half Done

fashion business owner musings

Raise your hand if you’ve got a list of half done business projects filling your tasks list, making you feel unproductive, scattered, and overwhelmed. Consider my hand raised.

Completing the projects we start can be a real challenge sometimes. I am the first to admit that I have allowed myself to get half way through things only to get distracted and start something else. It’s not good, but it happens.

I’ve actually been in the middle of this scenario for the past few months.

I think it stems from the fact that we love what we do and are always brimming with ideas for our brands, our products, and our communities. So we start stuff, super pumped to make it happen, and lots of other ideas work their way in and we lose focus.

I’m learning that while having a lot of ideas is great, completing them is better.

So this month, I’ve committed to making a list of all things I am half working on, and laying out each and every step I need to take to complete these projects. I’m going to break it down into bite-sized tasks so it’s easier to get it done. My goal is to have all four, yes four!, half done projects complete by the end of this month.

The reason I’m sharing this with you all is that I know what being half done does to our confidence. Feeling scattered and not in charge tends to make us feel a lot less like a boss.

Confidence in your own ability to make stuff happen is a major part of being successful.  

So I want to tell you, I get it. And I promise you that all us bosses face this at some point. And it doesn’t make us any less good at what we do, as long as we’re aware of it and take steps to address it when it’s happening.

So if you’re finding yourself in the midst of a million and four half-done projects, wondering what the hell you should be focusing on or how in the world you’re going to get it all done, don’t freak out.

Instead, organize all of those projects into a plan. List them out, break them down into step-by-step tasks. Jot down all new ideas into an ideas notebook and ignore it until your current projects are complete.

I can’t express to you how powerful and bad-ass you will feel when you #makeStUFhappen in your business!

Lots of love and encouragement,

Nicole Giordano

Nicole is the founder of StartUp FASHION, an online resource and community supporting for independent designers around the world with building their businesses. A deep love for the craft of fashion paired with an adamant belief that success is defined by the individual, led her to found StartUp FASHION, where she helps independent designers and makers screw the traditional fashion business rules, create their own paths, and build businesses they truly love. More than anything else, she’s in the business of encouragement and works every day to remind makers and designers that they have something special to offer the world and that they can, in fact, do this thing!