Monday 29 May 2017

Writing A Mission Statement

I have taken on two members of staff which has tripled the size of my business.  I am no longer a one man band, I am now the leader of a team.  Admittedly this is literally the smallest team it is numerically possible to have, but it is nonetheless a team.  And the first thing I need to do is to establish what our mission as a team is.  I haven’t  articulated it during the interview process.  In both cases there are people I have approached to work for me so it was a case of persuading them that I had a viable offer rather than interrogating them for what they could do for me.  So as things stand, they don’t have much of an idea of what I want from them.

So I need to tell them what we are doing so they know what decisions to make on a day to day basis.  This means I need a lot of clarity about what the goal is.  To achieve clarity one of the things I often do is to write something, often with an imaginary reader in mind.  (This works well for blog posts, which generally only have imaginary readers.)  

In this case the readers are far from imaginary and at least I know that what I am going to write will be read with some degree of interest.  So it really will be a mission statement.  

I am actually more interested in the next stage which will be writing the day to day procedures we will be following.  But I can’t do that without first deciding on the mission that those procedures will be serving.

Tuesday 25 April 2017

I Need To Write More

It's true that you need to write every day and the reality is that I read Twitter every day. It is easier. What I should do is wake up and start writing   and spend all these moments of my life learning how to better express myself. I don't have a job any more so the only thing stopping me from being productive us the set of habits that I have. I need to focus them on what really matters and not on continually reading trivia.

There used to be a Microsoft application that managed blog posts. I can't remember what it was called. But something like that would be good.

But whatever I need to be writing more.

Tuesday 3 January 2017

Time Blocking Draft 2

Time blocking is the practice of putting aside blocks of time for specific projects.  It is a good idea in principle.  If you have some time allocated on your calendar then you can be sure that the time will be used for that priority task.  

So why doesn’t everybody do it?  I can only talk about what goes wrong when I have tried it.

  1. The time block appears but for either good or bad reasons you find yourself doing something else instead.  You are now in a worse state than before.  You have devoted energy to creating the time block.  You now need to reschedule the time.  And you have demonstrated at least to yourself and possibly to others that you have no willpower or self discipline.
  2. You duly start the job, but find you have to do something else instead in order to achieve it.  So your block of time gets spent, but the result you wanted isn’t delivered.
  3. You are in such a state of flow on something else when the alarm for the time block goes off that you either decide it was a net disbenefit, or you simply don’t do it.
  4. It turns out that this job I was going to get finished in 2 hours actually needs 6.  I get to the end of the 2 hour period feeling like I have been going backwards even when I haven’t.
  5. You have to reschedule for some reason, so you have to move your time block adding to the complexity of your life.

The reality is that time blocking is actually a very advanced skill that only people with superb time management skills can use.  If you have the iron self discipline and the self awareness to use it, then it is a very useful thing to do.

 The interesting thing, is why it is so useful and why it is so hard. The basic resource we are dealing with here is not time, it is attention. You can't get to work on the time you have blocked out because in reality your attention is on something else. So if you break off what you are thinking about to do something else you are sacrificing one recipient of your attention for another.

Switching attention is itself work, and you never get that back again. And if it turns out that the thing you are thinking about before the time block is important, possibly even more important than what you are switching to, then you have lost out.

Sunday 1 January 2017

Making the time you spend count Draft 1



When I was a manager of a large team I noticed that it was much easier to get people in on a Saturday morning than it was to actually get them to do anything much when they got there.  Thinking about that, it occurred to me that it would probably not be necessary to trouble them on a Saturday if they had simply worked a bit smarter during the preceding week.

It is much easier to commit time to a project than it is to commit time to actually working in a systematic way.  Basically most effort is required for a reward at some distant point in time.   Hard work pays off in the end. But fiddling around on Facebook and having a chat with a colleague pays off now.   And there is no time that the mismatch between long term and short term benefits is starker than on a Saturday morning.  You have just spent five days away from entertainment and pleasure. And now you have to break your normal habits and work instead while you are at your most tired and most deprived of fun.   It is no wonder it doesn't work.

The motto is obvious to state but hard to follow through on.   The value of the time you have diminishes as the week goes on.  You simply have to schedule the important stuff early in the week and wind down steadily to some real relaxation and recuperation at the end of it.