'Small business' update 01
This was the first update, and was originally sent as an email. I'm posting it here so that I can link to it.
Lucy and I have been working on the upcoming 'small business' system for a week. It's starting to take shape: we have the outlines of the categories, and Lucy's sitting next to me now putting shape and structure to some of the first IDs.
We're using the 'life admin' system as our inspiration, but it's interesting just how much more there is to business. As soon as you start to pull something apart, it all unravels.
And we're realising that there are parts of this system that some of you will fill up, and parts that you might never touch. As we're building it we're testing it with a list of types of business:
- Personal trainer/yoga or pilates teacher
- Freelance/contract designer, writer, editor
- Wedding celebrant
- Any other type of house-related service - e.g. cleaning or fixing or installing or maintaining a thing
- Gardener/landscaper
- Pet groomer/trainer/accommodation
- Farming/agribusiness
- Market stallholders or suppliers of things - things you make (edible, non-edible) or grow (plants, eggs, meat)
- Hospitality - cafe, restaurant, food truck, catering
- Teaching, training, tutoring
- Architecture & interior design
- Accountant
- Healthcare - smaller or home-based physiotherapist, dentist, GP
- You have a retail shop or warehouse people come to
- Guiding/outdoor adventure/fishing
- Driving - wedding cars and limousines, private cars like George, deliveries and couriering, truck driver with your own truck
- Personal services/consulting in any industry
-- and so you can imagine that the food truck is going to make great use of our 'transport' section, but that's not something that Johnny.Decimal Inc. has any interest in whatsoever. We don't even own a car.
For this reason, we're keeping to the life admin theme of fairly broad IDs. As we're developing this using my beloved MindNode, our map of All The Things looks like this. (This is a super early work-in-progress: don't worry, the finished system will be a lot neater!)
MindNode has this lovely feature where you can focus in on a node. And that's how I like to imagine a system like this: yeah, there's a lot going on. But my job is to get you to the single ID that contains the thing you need, at which point your view becomes this:
...and, aah, that feels better.
A small example from real life. Just an hour ago I wanted to update my mailing list. It's called 'The Quarterly' and that's how I refer to it internally. So here's what I did:
- Launched Obsidian (with Raycast), hit Cmd-O, typed 'quart', saw the JDex entry appear, noted its number (23.13). Total elapsed time: <10s.
- Clicked the Finder window that is always open on the JD business system (remind me to tell you more about this one day), used the arrow keys ~10 times to get from where I was to 23.13. Total elapsed time: <10s.
- Opened the spreadsheet. And now I'm where I need to be. Total elapsed time: genuinely less than 30 seconds.
More importantly, this process was stress-free. I knew with certainty that the spreadsheet I was after was going to be in that folder.
This is what I want to bring to your business: I want you to be able to deal with the boring admin quickly, and with no stress. Leaving you more time to get on actually making the thing that you make; helping the people you help.
I'd love to hear more about you. Who are you? What do you do? What are your problems? Just reply, or we've got a Discord thread going here.
https://discord.gg/q2uKdazR29 > takes you to channel #the-lounge, then look for the 'who are you?' thread.
On the topic of Discord: who is already on there? If it's new to you, or you've used it and didn't like it -- I didn't, initially -- here's one little tip. By default it's in 'dark mode'. But I tend to work during the day! So change it to 'light mode'. It totally changed my relationship with the platform.
User settings (gear icon near your name) > app settings > appearance > choose 'light' theme.
j.