'Small business' update 02
This was originally sent as an email.
This week Lucy has been putting some proper shape to the first 'small business' category, 11 The business & its people. And I've made a good start on the helper app that will create your system for you.
Before we started working on this pack, we talked about using the 'life admin' pack as inspiration. You can draw a line from your personal life to a business that mostly makes sense.
- 11 Me & other living things → The business & its people
- 12 Where I live & how I get around → Where you trade & how you get around
- 13 Money → no change
- 14 Technology → no change
- 15 Travel, events, & fun → perhaps becomes marketing & PR? TBC
We really tried to humanise 'life admin'. Organising your files is already a boring chore -- I don't need to make it more tedious. And we found that by telling ourselves a story, and explaining that story in the pack, things became more obvious in our minds.
And unless you've really rationalised it, chewed it over in your mind, changed your mind a few times, thought you were crazy, realised you weren't, yes, no ... it takes a while for this story to find its feet. For the narrative to emerge.
When it does, the story coalesces, and the structure really starts to make sense. It's like it becomes tangible.
Earlier today we had a discussion on the nuance of your 11.12 Licences & permits. In the context of a business, what licences does it hold, which are held by its employees, and what's the difference (if any)?
This pack is a challenge to produce because everywhere you look, 'it depends'. You can very often find a counter-example.
Say you're a freelance forklift driver. In order to be that, you MUST have a forklift licence: therefore it lives in 11.12.
But a few years on and you've hired people to work for you. Now you win business and manage accounts. And so the staff hold forklift licences, and those licences live somewhere alongside the staff members. They're no longer core to the business: because if one of those people loses their licence, your business doesn't stop trading. You just employ someone else.
Now, though, you rent a warehouse, and to run forklifts from there it MUST comply with city ordnance §23.6.(b).iv. So now that's the thing that needs to be in 11.12.
We think the best way to explain how we feel about this ID is this: there's a knock on the door. It's the city's inspector. The first thing they want to see is the licences & permits that your business requires to trade. After that, they'll continue their inspection: but until they've checked the basics, there's no point going on.
This visit is no stress for you: you just give them everything from 11.12.
Meanwhile I've got the skeleton of the JD-system-builder app up and running. You give it 'a system' of data, and it creates your index files and file system folders.
Given the variety of apps that people use to keep their notes, that's not a world I want to play in. I'm going to produce Markdown and plain-text files for you, and you can import them in to whatever app you already use.
But we thought that this app might serve a broader function, as your system manual. For 'life admin' we produced a PDF, and we won't be doing that again: it's a nightmare to keep up to date.
Instead of that, what if my app was your manual? Searchable, constantly updated, all the latest information, interesting links as we find them, new versions of ops manuals as they're written, translations -- whatever you can think of.
This means that we can keep the long wordy stuff out of your JDex. It stays simple: just the ID's header and brief description. Then the rest of the space is yours to keep your own notes. And if you want more background, there's a link there that'll open up the manual page in the app.
(If you do want a PDF, I just got that working earlier today: just hit a button, and it's generated on the fly.)
This is surprisingly hard work, but I sit writing this underneath a crabapple tree in full flower, so life's okay. Onwards and upwards.
