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Birthday

So it’s really quite weird coming back to a blog after three years, reading text after yourself so much later that you’ve completely forgotten writing it. I’ve spent the time between last writing on this blog and now either not writing this kind of content, or writing in a diary. The diaries are really quite useful when going back, but the writing style (in my case) is more one of exhaustive completeness for future reference rather than readability. And so as you can maybe already tell I’m struggling to find my concise voice!

It was my birthday yesterday, and because it falls exactly between Christmas and New Year’s I now have a couple of days where I can basically avoid work for the most part. And so one gets to thinking.

I think the lovely part of writing a blog is that it forces you to step back and look at yourself in a certain way, imagining an unseen (and no doubt disinterested!) public being introduced to you for the first time. This blog for me was always a thing of hope, a public diary on the way to hopefully doing amazing things. A few years ago, when I was poor, I remember thinking that I should write a diary, and chronicle my journey from poor to what I hoped would be financially comfortable for more than a few months for the first time in my life. I’m kind of glad I didn’t, because I think in many ways I did it stupidly: I took too long, I worked too hard, didn’t learn quickly enough, left various messes that took ages to clean up afterwards; I didn’t read enough novels, or spend enough time on relationships, and so on.

And so this blog is, at least partly, an attempt to chronicle the next part of things, during which I do them better. Even taking the time to reflect a little and write a post or two a week is, I think, a sign of focusing energy in the right place.

And, so, what’s to come? Some of the things I’m interested in at the moment are:

  • How do you manage people, in a positive, productive way
  • How do you absolutely minimise the amount of time that you spend working, or at least the time spent working that you don’t genuinely, unambiguously enjoy. I’m constantly feeling like I’m behind, and never ahead, and I want to feel like I’m forging ahead somewhere exciting rather than running away from the chaos and mess and chasing my tail
  • Much the same as the above, what’s the best way to manage and separate work and the rest of one’s life
  • How can organisations that I control positively impact the world around them
  • What new ventures should I start, and how can these get off the ground as insanely quickly as possible
  • How do I best approach daily work to actually get things done
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Starting with the obvious

There are many motivations for running a business or starting a new project, including making a profit, achieving non-income based project goals and so on. I think it is helpful however, especially at the start, to explicitly set the goal of actually enjoying oneself, and getting along with other people.

What the work is like is important, especially if your actual goals are as relatively hollow as making money.

The things to watch out for:

  • distraction is disastrous. One needs at least a couple of unstressed, undisturbed hours alone a day.
  • doing more than one thing at once. It almost always takes longer to do three things at the same time than doing three things in succession.

This post has the weirdness of being started in 2013, and partially completed in 2016. This line is in the three year gap

  • not being able to step back, either at all, or often enough, and look with perspective
  • if you’re diving in to big or many projects, you just have to work on limiting the amount of time and mental space you expend on them. This is my opinion, but I’m not sure anyone is likely to ever talk me out of it. I’ve done the long, 70 hour weeks, and I’ve done the head in the sand it will run by itself. Neither is ideal, but the latter definitely makes you happier and more relaxed. I think the trick is to be engaged, but clever, and expending the time doing difficult thinking, not putting in super long hours.

more to come!

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Recruitment

When you do find someone great, it’s amazing, and makes incredible things possible. Finding good people (and then managing / delegating properly) is one of the main characteristics of any successful business. Finding good people to work with or for you is well known to be difficult.

It’s interesting how completely different the two sides of the process are (hiring vs looking for work). By this I mean, for example, how different a resume looks when you’re looking at it from the point of view of the employee or the employer.

Here are several points which I’ve found useful to remember:

  • Taking the first step is a frequent barrier to entry. Writing good job ads, reading applications and interviewing is an incredible amount of work, however natural procrastination can inflate this to a point of absolute inertia.
  • Structure is good. While this is generic in that it applies to most tasks, outlining the general process, and listing the parts involved makes it clear that the first step can be less than several hours of work, and the whole process then takes on its own momentum.
  • It’s very important to not waste time. You don’t need to read all the way through every crappy resume. If the first two sentences make it clear that the applicant can’t write, pay attention to details, would annoy you or your clients and so on, then your job is to move immediately to the next one.
  • You’ve got to look at applications in batches. If you can’t stand messages sitting in your mailbox as they arrive, move them to a ‘pending processing’ folder.

Resume tips. This assumes you’re actually trying to get the job, obviously:

coming soon!

 

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Decision making

Decision making can be a huge block in business. I find circular, repetitive thought patterns are hard to avoid when trying to make a decision, and one need tools to get through.

A pen and paper and a disciplined approach is often enough. Writing down the components of the decision can be incredibly useful.

Also helpful is staying super aware of how much time you’re spending on a decision, as well as how much you’re willing to accept the necessary psychological discomfort that by its nature comes from having to choose one of several plausible options.

Some random strategies:

  • break it down and write everything down
  • work backwards where possible
  • fix points / decisions that can be fixed without other things being decided first
  • accept that it’s ok to sometimes make bad or less than ideal decisions
  • maintain perspective, and let go of perfection. Some decisions are much more important than others.