Living Entrepreneurship Blog / Babson Entrepreneurs

Multitasking in a Coworking Environment

Reflecting on when we were working out of the Babson Summer Ventures program back in the summer of 2009, with startups like BongoBing and their founders Raul Pellerano and Mikaela Gillette, working on our startup, supporting them when they needed help, thinking about how I could cleverly go to my day job and work on Blank Label at the same time, it wasn’t an easy task. Actually, it usually is easy to multitask, but what is hard is effectively multitasking and optimizing all efforts at the same time. The fact was, when we were thinking about anything other than our startup, we were expensing a lot of energy even though we didn’t think we did because we’d shift focus onto something else, then spend a decent amount of time on that new thing, then try to snap back into focus when we were ready to work on Blank Label’s brands again.

This isn’t to say that it wasn’t useful working with the BongoBing team, because in fact, they were incredibly helpful in helping us decide new directions and executing special plans. But collaboration of that sort should generally be limited for startups. I was speaking with another entrepreneur the other day about the benefits of working in a coworking space and they said that while they don’t do a lot of professional mingling and a lot more social, they enjoy the space because they feed off of the energy the other entrepreneurs have which is unbelievable since you know everyone else is working hard and if you’re all working hard towards similar goals, then it motivates you to do more. That’s an awesome thing to have.

Danny Wong co-founded Blank Label Group back in 2009, first starting Blank Label, then RE:custom and finally Thread Tradition. Danny is also a blogger over at outlets HuffingtonPost, TheNextWeb and ReadWriteWeb.