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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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Making projects work – an introduction

A lot is written on running businesses, much of it crap, some of it great. I’m hoping that while this may be unorganised and sometimes suffer from a lack of perspective, it will at least clear my head and provide some central place to put more general ideas about how things should be done.

In western countries, running businesses isn’t all that incredibly hard, especially if you have some average intelligence, an ability to learn, and are prepared to spend some time on it. When things work overall, it’s possible to see things that on their own may not be especially enjoyable as enjoyable nevertheless, because they are small parts of a bigger, fulfilling push.

It’s not completely easy, however, to do something amazing, well and so on. This, I think, takes a little more thinking, imagination, and some level of self control over how one works. There are also notable traps that most people probably fall into to some extent, being both conceptual and procedural. The procedural relate most often, I think, to doing things that waste time, or required things in such a way that they waste time. Conceptual more to misapplied focus, a misunderstanding of what’s important or required to get somewhere, and so on.

So this is the first post in a series that will outline how I / we do business, what we try to do, and perhaps some space will be cleared in both my mind and the readers’.

The first piece of advice is a general one: be clever, flexible, and aware that a whole lot more is possible than you probably think is.