lunaray.substack.com/p/women-foun...
In the simplest terms, my (imperfect) solutions for women founders facing a lack of respect from their own teams are:
1. Know your truth
2. Communicate your truth
3. Choose a team that gets it
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It brings me so much sadness that this is something many women founders have to deal with. Founding a company is hard enough; having to earn the respect of your team at a basic level day-in-and-day-out can be exhausting.
I’ve recently been in conversation with a handful of women founders who feel they are not receiving the full respect of their teams.
These women are the founders of companies: the CEOs, the CTOs, and COOs.
wait... wait... do I know what this is?
9. Keep your phone away from your desk, don’t bring it to meetings, and put it in do-not-disturb or airplane mode during the day. The dopamine-response cycle can massively disrupt our ability to focus.
8. Take breaks to give your brain a chance to rest. Whether that’s 15 minutes in the afternoon for a walk or meditation, a longer break when you need it, or a week+ vacation. Rest helps the brain recover and will enhance your creativity.
7. Set start and end times to your day and honor them. Keep a consistent bed time so you can honor your start time.
6. Batch shorter meetings together back-to-back (e.g., 1:1s) to minimize the number of awkward 15 and 30 minute gaps in your calendar.
5. Take ownership of when things show up in your calendar for your own optimal productivity. If your deep thinking occurs best in the morning, make sure you have the longer blocks you need then for those tasks.
4. Make / block time for planning. Weekly planning of tasks for yourself, longer-term planning and goal-setting for your team (yearly, quarterly, monthly, etc. depending on stage).
3. Block time on your calendar to do the “important but not urgent” tasks (e.g., strategy, deep thinking about longer-term problems, etc.).
2. Always know what the most important thing you need to do each day is. Block time on your calendar to do your most important task(s) each day, at your most productive time, preferably first thing.
Productivity hacks from YC founders:
1. Always have a to-do list. Update your to-do list for the day before starting that day (the morning of that day, as the last thing you do before you leave the day before, or sometime in the afternoon the day before).