Wow. Now.
Archive for the ‘Management’ Category.
In the past, when I thought about building a web application, I had a huge resistance to the idea of outsourcing 100% of the development work. The first fear that pops into my mind: What if I pay for all this work and the application is not a success?
Thinking about that, I started to develop a new question: Why do I worry so much about the payoff when my investment is money, but I worry a lot less about the payoff when the investment is my time and energy?
What have you done for your business in the most recent hour that you put into it? In the last eight hours of work? In the last 40 hours?
Let’s get more specific. Look at the last 10 hours you’ve put into your business. If somebody else had done that for you, how much would you pay them for the results they produced? Is it worth $1,000 to you? $500? $100?
Divide that number by 10 and you have your hourly rate.
How well are you performing at that rate?
In a previous article I discussed making your business modular. Let’s look at one task and see how we can modularize it.
Every week I buy groceries. It’s easy to look at this as one activity but actually it involves a lot of different tasks and roles.
Continue reading ‘Make Your Tasks Modular’ »
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?
Stephen Robbins, in The Truth About Managing People
He gives an example:
It’s good to be clear on which things you do that nobody else can do. Don’t overestimate it. Don’t underestimate it.
Most of your resources should be applied to things only you can do. When you spend hours working on a task that somebody else (internal or external) can do for fixed cost/time, you are like one of those proto-airplanes–you know, those old machines with a huge engine and fifteen wings, bouncing up and down trying to fly.
