How to move your business forward, without adding hours

01·Where you are now

You work more hours than any employed person you know, and at the end of the year the business is roughly where it started.

Could putting out fires be what's wrecking you? “The mounting overload and overwhelm in an area comes entirely from cope-cope-cope without organizing also.” The effort goes into putting fires out, not into building.

And it costs you the product itself. Confusion is flow with no pattern: a lot of movement, and nothing goes out of the door. “To have a product something must flow OUT.”

As long as the effort goes into putting fires out, more hours and even another hire won't change that, because “we will also add confusion.” I once did very hard work myself, and my body was tired and my back hurt.

02·Who's talking to you: Axel Jedlitschka

I decided to work in a job that is more managerial, and less physical

I worked at a bar. During one shift I held a 30-litre keg of beer, and my back locked up. I carried on with the shift, and nobody helped.

In the days after, I could do fewer things, and I didn't feel free and energetic the way I usually do. So I decided I had to work in a job that is more managerial and less physical. I'm not against hard work. I'm against “cope-cope-cope without organizing also.”

Axel Jedlitschka

04·There is a way

Organising backwards

Another hour and another hire address the quantity, not the direction. Battering at water is real work, and it is exhausting, but it does nothing. The way is to see your work as a flow: what comes in, what changes, what goes out, and where it stops. And for that you organise backwards, from the product.

1. 01The final product.Decide what leaves the business at the end, in the customer's words.
2. 02Work backwards.Which earlier products each step needs in order to get there.
3. 03The doing.What actually makes each one of them.
4. 04The names.Only now do you decide who does what.

“In a flood if you can channel the water, you can handle the flood. If you just batter at water you drown.”

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