Behind from the start...

This spring I have done very few outfit posts. It’s not that I gave up getting dressed and moved to a nudist colony—although how crazy would that be? I simply have not planned very well.

After running The Refined Woman for the first few years without much of a game plan, we realized we had to create a more sustainable system for our content. By constantly posting at the last minute we weren’t setting ourselves up for the space to grow. If you’re treading water, all you can focus on is the task at hand.

You have to first get on solid ground before you can start thinking about other things outside of survival mode.

In the past, if we had scheduled an outfit post for a Tuesday and one of us forgot to do it, the other would hurry the morning of and scramble to throw something together. It was Elizabeth— our senior editor, contributor, and mentor who pointed out that we were running an online magazine.

That shifted something in me.
In my head it was just a blog.

But magazines have editorial calendars up to 18 months in advance. If we wanted others to take us seriously, we first had to start holding ourselves higher. Elizabeth also helped us come up a set of core values, including authenticity, work-life balance, and rest.

“If you’re treading water, all you can focus on is the task at hand.” - Kat Harris

For the last 18 months we have been working hard at creating processes, expanding our team, getting organized, creating space to dream and vision cast in order to set us up for success. Now we typically plan our style posts a quarter in advance. And we have a team of ladies working on all the articles we feature from contributors up to six months in advance. Even with a solid team in place, I still sometimes feel behind before I even get started on a project.

But here’s the cool thing about being on a team that values work life balance, rest, and community: we carry one another’s burdens.

There are days where someone takes one for the team. Now that we have systems in place and have opened ourselves up to the support of a team things are much smoother even when I feel disorganized. I can go to my team and see if there’s a post already ready that we can shift to go live that day. Or we just skip posting for a day.