Karen Gill and Maxine Benson are founders of everywoman.co.uk - a website dedicted to female business owners. Read their weekly blog here.

It seems every one we speak to is saying the same thing: "This year is manically busy. We looked up and found ourselves in June, we're nearly half way through the year - how did that happen?"

When we hit the ground running in the New Year, we bemoaned the fact that we hadn't had the chance to knock off those non-urgent jobs that had been building up in the last quarter of 2007. We'd been telling ourselves, as we hurtled towards Christmas, "Don't worry, we'll have time in the New Year." Wrong. And frankly, we can't see any let-up.

Around Easter, by the time we had shifted into overdrive, we consoled ourselves with the fact that come June it would get quieter and we could get on top of things then. Well, June is here and we've never been busier. We keep reminding ourselves that when you're a growing business, busy is a good thing. But perhaps, we asked ourselves, before the year gets too much further along, we should stop for a moment and check whether we were really working as effectively as we could.

Since we have published a book on time management, we had some tools at hand. We went to the stock room, pulled out copies of the book for each member of the team to take home and read.

We made a pact to answer the questionnaire honestly, "How often do your tasks take longer than you expected? How often do you schedule in time for yourself? How often do your meetings over-run?" And so it went... Oh dear.

We reasoned that it's not that we don't know what we should be doing. Like so many things in life - losing weight, getting fit, eating healthily - we know the 'what to do' bit, it's the 'how to do' bit that we forget. We just need reminding now and again. Of course, it's finding the time to do it that's the problem.

We took ourselves through an audit of how we were working, re-evaluating what was urgent and what could wait, revisiting the business plan and asking ourselves, "In order to achieve the goals we set ourselves in this plan, which of these activities must take priority?"