How to handle overload, without turning work away

01·Where you are now

The business is finally working, there’s more work than ever, and everything starts to break. Customers wait, and things fall through the cracks.

Could the problem be not the growth, but what didn’t grow with it? “So overexpansion is only underorganization in the main.” What looks like too much growth is almost always too little organisation.

And it costs you. You’re working longer hours than you did when there was less to do. “The number of man hours are measured in gallons of sweat”, and revenue doesn’t move.

And every hour you put into building capacity feels like an hour stolen from the work itself. The scramble for product is what wrecks the capacity to produce it.

02·Who’s talking to you: Axel Jedlitschka

Today I decide more about my time

It all started with an income and expenses table I wanted to build for myself. I built a few versions, moved to Google Sheets, and from there it kept developing, until those abilities really served me in my work.

Today I think about how to streamline my decisions, my time, my resources and my actions, to make my work easier. That is why I’m against “It’s faster to do it myself”: it’s right once, and wrong a hundred times.

Axel Jedlitschka

04·There is a way

Three paces that must move together

“It’s continuous expansion of volume, continuous expansion of organization, continuous expansion of demand. Where one lags behind the others one gets trouble.” Volume is how much work comes in. Organisation is how much capacity you have to handle it. And demand is how many people want you.

1. 01The three paces.Write down three numbers for the past year: how much work came in, how much capacity you added, how much demand you generated. Then mark which one lagged.
2. 02The role list.Twenty minutes: write down every role you fill, in names you invent. The act of listing brings relief on its own.
3. 03The weekly gap.Once a week, count how much came in and how much went out. Overwhelm is inflow without outflow.
4. 04A slot for building.A fixed weekly slot in the diary, purely for building: a procedure, a tool, training, structure. Not “whenever there’s time”.

“Now, the power of a motor… depends upon the base, it does not depend on the terminals, it depends on the base. It is the thing that holds the terminals apart and holds them in position.”

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