An effective schedule is composed solely of Routine, Rocks and Reserves. You should be able to look at your calendar and see them.

Routine.
This is missing from most entrepreneur’s schedule. It’s the routine meetings and regular times you review reports. Of course you don’t have time for this. There’s too much happening in your day. And all those damn interruptions. What you don’t realize is that if you have the right routine it minimizes the interruptions and the surprises. But you may have to give up the adrenaline addiction, so it won’t feel the same.

What is the right routine? More than I can go into here but check out Mastering The Rockefeller Habits by Verne Harnish. It involves doing certain things daily, others weekly, monthly and quarterly. You can do them by phone when traveling so there’s no excuse. And they don’t take a lot of time but they must be done consistently.

Rocks.
These are the important things that are never urgent. The name comes from a story told in First Things First by Stephen Covey. (Buy it used at Amazon for a penny.)

The gist is that if you want to fill a bucket with some rocks, some gravel, some sand and some water, you need to put the rocks in first and let the other stuff flow around them. Your rocks are the projects you want to get done but can’t find time for. Pick one. Two at the most. You need to put rock time on your calendar just like you would any important meeting. Work on them till they’re finished then move to the next rocks. In a year, you’ll get much more done than if you try to work on thirty at once a little at a time.

For some people, rocks are the production time they need – this is true for lawyers, graphic artists, phone sales people and the like. The key to these rocks is to schedule time that’s uninterrupted and keep it that way. Don’t check email, don’t answer the phone, make sure the others in your office know not to knock unless there’s blood or fire.

Reserves
Once your schedule has the routines and rocks in it, there should be space. That means you have to be selective about scheduling your rocks. Don’t fill up the schedule. Leave that space alone. The holes in your calendar are your reserve. They will fill up. Some problems and emergencies will arise (fewer than when you didn’t have routine, but some will.) More importantly, some opportunities will show up and you’ll now have time to take advantage of them. That’s what reserves are for.

Takeaways:

• It’s a bit of a skill to get the right balance of the 3 R’s but when you get it down, you and your company will be more productive and less harried.
• You know you’ve got the skill down when you plan which rocks you’ll deal with at the start of the week, and by the end, you’ve handled all the rocks you planned to as well as dealt with all the stuff that came up.
• By picking fewer rocks and scheduling time to actually complete them you may find you’ll accomplish more by doing less.
• You have to be a slave to the routine – but it sets you free.

It strikes me that some of these lies are fine – even helpful – and others make me think “Guy, you’re a smart fellow you can do better than this”. Still others are most detrimental to the liar. I’ll illustrate one of each.

Money is often the easiest thing to change. Lower the price and expect sales to go through the roof. Offer employees a bonus and expect sales to go through the roof, or turnover to diminish or whatever. But usually decisions are based on more than just money and changing the money just because it’s easy isn’t always smart.

Garage Sale
I was reminded of this because we’re having a garage sale (have I mentioned we’re selling our house? www.seiffer.org). Garage sales are business at it’s most basic. And like most business transactions the motivations are more complex than they appear. Sure we want to get as much money as possible. But we also want to get rid of stuff. And for the hassle is it really worth the money at all? (We got about $300 on the first day and another $175 the second.) And the buyers. Yes they want a bargain. But how low is a bargain? How much more will they buy if the price is cheap enough? Don’t they have anything better to do with their time? And do they really need the stuff they buy? A woman bought a stuffed pig that squeaks and oinks and jiggles when you squeeze it – for her dog.

Cement Trowel
A woman walked in and didn’t say a word. She poked around and picked up a trowel – the kind you do cement work with. I can’t remember why I have it or if I ever used it. But it’s a nice, sturdy trowel – not one of those cheap ones. She walked around with it in her hand for about 10 minutes, never saying anything and never picking anything else up. Finally she put the trowel down and left. My wife and I were amused. We had both wanted to say “Just give us a dollar and take it already.” But we knew it wasn’t about the money. If she took it, she’d have to live with it. And put it someplace, And explain to herself (and maybe someone else) why she bought it.

Hand Truck
We sold an old beat up hand truck. Also for a dollar. It was orange. With the wheels almost falling off. The kind where the handle comes out and it lays back on the little wheels and the handle goes in another way and it turns into a cart. Except the little wheels have been lost, and the pin that holds the handle in place is a bent nail. The guy who bought it took one look and said “I’ve always wanted one of these” and paid me a buck. I had to laugh because the thing was in almost the same condition when I bought it at a garage sale umpteen years ago. I looked at it and had exactly the same reaction. I know I paid more than a buck. I bet he would have too. But I just couldn’t bring myself to ask for more.

Takeaways:

• How many decisions in your business aren’t really about the money?
• Decisions your employees make?
• Decisions your customers make?
• Decisions you make?
• The hard part of your job is determining what each decision is really about and dealing with that.

“The former helps you get visibility for your product, the latter defines how you will actually make money. ” So says  Dharmesh Shah of  OnStartups.com

His post is about the software business and his main point is a the bottom. But I think it applies to may other companies as well.  Not knowing your business model is a huge impediment to business growth.

I promised myself when I started this blog that I’d not write about politics unless I took the time to show the direct link to your business. But last weekend I rented a dumpster because we’re putting the house on the market [www.seiffer.org - make me an offer before we list it with a realtor]. And when the bill came there was a $15 gas surcharge (4%). Our company pays UPS about 5 grand a week. I don’t even look at how much they’re charging us in gas surcharges. And of course we charge customers a gas surcharge too. We get about 1,000 a month that way.

This hurts business in two ways – the added costs we have to charge make it harder to sell but don’t profit us any. And the added costs we have to pay decrease our bottom line. And who benefits? Not you, not your customer. Exxon is the one with record profits last quarter. But I don’t blame them (at least not for that). This is a problem with political roots. The world system of depending on oil has to change. And this kind of thing has happened before. Europe was powered (or at least heated) by wood hundreds of years ago till they burned all the forests down. So they figured out how to use coal till oil was put to use.

We knew this was coming and decided to go for short term, immediate comfort/profit rather than long term gain. Some of you are old enough to remember gas lines and no-gas-on-Sundays back in 1973. Then President Carter proposed we allocate some resources to developing alternative fuels and to conservation. As a country we didn’t really give it anything but lip service.

And we went back to business as usual. We justified it by taking comfort in those intervening years when oil was $10 a barrel. But that just allowed us to wallow in our denial. Even at $10 a barrel, oil pollutes the atmosphere. We enjoyed our denial about the environmental effect of oil addiction. And our denial about the control over our economy we were giving to foreign leaders who weren’t (and aren’t) exactly working in our bests interests – either economically or in terms of our values: freedom, democracy, human rights etc.

So we played along, ignoring the obvious consequences of our action (or inaction) and now we’re shocked, SHOCKED! that we have to pay 75% of what the rest of the world pays for gas instead of the 50% we’re used to paying. Just wait till we have to pay as much as Europe has been paying for years. And I’m just counting the pump price – not the price in lives lost to air pollution, or war, or _____________ (you fill in the blank).

But it’s human nature to go for short term solutions instead of long term ones. Somehow we believe that going for the long haul makes it less pleasant in the present. And it’s true in many areas (weight loss, quitting smoking, saving for a car instead of borrowing for one). But here’s the real tragedy. It’s not always true in business.

We’ve all read about companies that were forced to put restrictions on their pollution output only to find they could make a profit from chemicals they recovered. Or that were forced to treat employees better only to find they got improved productivity or lower turn over. Is it really so hard to believe that had we put as much effort into energy conservation and alternative fuels in the 1970′s as we did toward the moon shot in the 1960′s that not only would we be better off now, but we’d have been better off by 1976 (say) and the 1980′s and 90′s would have been even better than they were? Carter of course wasn’t as personable as JFK so it was harder for him to get support. Jimmy seemed more of a wimp to us than Jack (or Ronald). And it’s un-American to follow wimps – even when they’re right.

Can you imagine the new products and technologies American ingenuity would have developed? How many high paying jobs that we would have created? How much better our air and water and global warming situation would be? How much it would have affected our trade balance to be exporting that kind of stuff all over the world? Not to mention the effect on peace, if the oil producers had been made as economically and politically impotent as say the buggy whip industry?

Instead we took the short term route and look at the fine mess we’ve gotten ourselves into. It doesn’t take much to figure out which politicians are trying to prolong the status quo when it comes to oil, the environment etc. Unfortunately the ones who want to change things don’t show enough balls or leadership as I’d like to see. But let’s support them anyway. It may be too late, but our only hope is to vote and work as if it’s not.

Takeaways: The political takeways are the same as the business takeaways.

• Vote for (and support) leaders with a vision for the future that’s based on facts – not someone with a nice personality.
• Don’t ignore the facts because they are unpleasant and the consequences aren’t immediate.
• Don’t assume that working for a long term solution – one that’s supported by the facts and the science, even if unpopular – will always mean a long time of sacrifice. You have to be willing to sacrifice for the truth, but when you are, it might turn out better – sooner than you think.
• There’s a real problem with how most businesses think they are affected by politics. It’s too short sighted and hurts them in the long run.

The job of a manager is not to control people. And it’s not to cut costs. It’s to set up an environment that allows people to do their best. By environment, I don’t mean cushy chairs, beautiful artwork, free food and foosball – though that may be part of it. I mean the right job descriptions, proper training, reporting structures and monitoring that are useful rather than frustrating. Useful in doing what the company is supposed to do – provide value to the customer.

Read this article by Joel Spolsky. Ignore the techno babble (it’s written for programmers) but concentrate on how it shows what managers did to make it impossible for employees to do a good job. The managers didn’t try to do this – it happened because they were trying to do something else (cut costs or control people) and didn’t know what their job was.

Takeaways:

• The manager works by designing systems that support employees to do a good job for the customer.

Terry Wilson-Malam

Congratulations Terry. Her email was picked at random and I’ll be sending her A Whole New Mind (the book anyway).

Thanks to all who participated. See you in St. Louis – please tap me on the shoulder and let me know you entered the contest. But note: I don’t have my beard anymore (it’s an old picture).

[REMINDER - today at midnight is the deadline for the Whole New Mind give-away]

Suppose you’re ready to make a change. Perhaps you’ll stop solving your employee’s problems for them and empower (require) them to suggest solutions along with the problems. Maybe you’ll start delegating in a more formal way and restrict yourself from following up except for the milestones you’ve previously agreed on. Maybe you’ll start recording decisions that get made in meetings, or writing down action items.

You think you can do this, after all the changes mostly involve your behavior and you’re the boss. You think it might feel weird but you’ll just jump in and ride out the weirdness – like when you gave up smoking, or started working out.

Big mistake. For two reasons. One is social, and the other is social.

#1 – Work is a social place. When people interrupt you with a problem, it’s not just because they don’t know what to do. There’s always another component to it. Perhaps they want permission. Perhaps they just want to interact with you. Maybe they want to be noticed. Whatever it is, if you just change your behavior without explanation, they’ll miss that other part that’s gone away. They’ll wonder if they did something to make you mad. They’ll be less communicative and wait for it to blow over.

#2 – People (even you) are social creatures. You’ll do better with support. We rarely change all at once. If you explain what you’re doing and why, people will help you keep the change going. You can even agree on language they can use to keep you on track – it’s important they know how to talk to the boss.

Takeaways:

• Discuss the changes you intend to make.
• Get people’s feedback and help.
• Agree on acceptable language for them and for you.
• Let them know it’s not personal.

This is one of the side benefits to using a coach or consultant to make the changes. Instead of it being your idea, you can “blame” it on the coach. That makes it easier to rally round the change and for people to confront each other in a constructive way to keep the change going.

Sorry for the delay in posting – I’ve been at what I heard was the largest venture fair east of the Mississippi. It was my first time at something like this. Very enlightening.

Over 100 companies asking for money. 25 in “late state” meaning they had revenue of over $1million and the rest “early state.” The industries ranged all over the map. A medical device to cool spinal fluid and reduce paralysis to a replacement for terazzo tile made with recycled glass. There was a portable solar hot water heater and an online video game for women.

All of what I saw was well thought out and most was well presented. All were past the “just an idea” stage – at least a prototype and some had been in business for 10 years and were raising money for the next stage of growth.

It’s the 13th annual one that this group put on. The concensus was there were not enough investors there – perhaps it’s gotten so popular nobody goes there anymore. It also seems that Connecticut is behind the curve in organizing investors at the angel level (where I play). That may have something to do with it. I heard that nation wide in 2005 angel investors put up the same amount of money as VCs but they put it into 49,000 deals where as VCs funded 3,000 (not sure those numbers are exact, but the scale is).

I found 3 companies that look interesting. Not sure I’ll put money into any of them but I’ll continue my research. Mostly I made some good connections for a company I’m working with and with some other investors to learm more about how this game is played.

I’ll keep you posted.