WAKEshine

Suppose that five people approached you right now and volunteered to work on your project.  Could you fit them into your process right away?

It’s worth it right now to split your work into processes that can be performed by different roles, even if you don’t have any employees (or volunteers) yet.

Why?

First off, it’s a good idea to start thinking of the work you do in terms of how it fits the overall vision.  Most work will fall into one of these categories:

• Marketing
• Operations
• Product Development
• System Development/Maintenance
• Administration
• Project Management

You may feel that you are very busy running a company, but if you are spending most of your time in Administration, you are actually working as an administrator.  If you spend 90% of your time in Development and Operations, and less than 10% in Marketing, you may be wondering where all your traffic is.  By splitting your work out into well-defined processes, it gets easier to see where you are spending your time, and how effectively you are using the resources you have.

Another great reason to break out your system into separate roles and responsibilities is to prepare for the situation where you can get extra help–either through volunteers or when you need to hire somebody.

An example of splitting out a function is web statistics (hit counts).  I have a weekly task of preparing a report of my web stats.  Before I did this, I found myself checking my hit counts all day long.  This interrupts other things I could be doing and also raises one function of the business to a higher priority.

It also violates my policy of not turning my business into an obsession.

What I’ve done is to separate this task to something that I do every Saturday.  The result is:

• I do this task less often
• The task itself becomes more productive (the report is a higher picture than constant checking)
• When I’m working on higher-level tasks I can stay focused and not worry about other parts of the business
• If I needed somebody to help me, I could explain and split off this task very easily

This last bullet point is very significant.  Before I started splitting my work into modules and layers, I couldn’t have asked somebody to help me even if they were willing.  It would be impossible to explain how to do what I do.  But now, because I have well-defined tasks, I’m always ready for help when it arrives.  And it’s amazing how often I bump into people who want to get some experience doing web businesses and are willing to work on the sites.

Furthermore, if I ever ran into a situation where I had to have extra help (e.g. 36 hours of work that must be completed in the next 12 hours), I’m ready to hire somebody if necessary to come in and help.

But the best part of this "loose coupling" system is that from the time you initiate it, you are working the way you ultimately would like to work.  You do the heart of the business, you do the parts you love best, and let employees and assistants do the rest.

It’s just that, for a while, those employees and assistants are you.  But when the time is right, it’s an easy handoff.