Coffee! COFFEE ALWAYS!

When I first started at this job I thought “Awesome! Free Coffee! All day!”. Then I tasted it. It tasted like they were using cigarette butts in place of coffee filters.

At my last place of business, they used Folgers. Which always reminds me of camping and never tastes good. The first scoop out of a freshly opened can tastes exactly like the last scoop out of a six-month old can. Congrats to Folgers on consistency, but when every scoop tastes like it’s six months old, something’s gotta change.

So I started springing for office coffee out of my own pocket. Peet’s. It was glorious. Fresh, delicious coffee. Only I was paying for all of it for everyone in the office. While it was uncool, it was better than drinking Folgers.

At my current employer, everyone drinks coffee all day. That’s too much coffee for me to spring for it myself. So after I had my first taste, I started trying to make things better. I replaced the airpots (which smelled terrible and that must affect the taste), and got bids from four different coffee service places to figure out how to move away from the Costco putrescence we were currently plagued with. Replacing the equipment was out of the question for now.

Almost a year later, finally, we have a coffee service. I’m not going to go into the details of what it took to make this minor miracle happen (it wasn’t me), but I will keep you updated on how well this goes.

Process Management

…is turning out to be more a part of my life and this job than I expected.

Right now we’re implementing a new business management system. It is, in fact, the reason I am staying on another month after I’ve “moved” to Chicago.

As some of you may know, I already did this once at this job. But the last one wasn’t all-inclusive and lacked important features (CRM, accounting, parallel workflows, splitting and combining jobs, etc.) that made us immediately begin shopping for a new one. The one we chose (TQT) has everything we wanted, with the flexibility to allow us to build it to reflect the way we do business.

The problem is that it has the flexibility to allow us to build it to reflect the way we do business – even if we’re doing it wrong. In comes “process management”. This is where we figure out what we’re doing and how we could be doing it better, faster, stronger. Maybe not stronger.

Building good processes means not only figuring out how to build processes that work, but figuring out how to break the process.

This is much like programming. It’s easy to build programs that work when you have a well trained, well intentioned user. It’s much harder to build programs that still work when you have a poorly trained user. And if your well trained user is malicious, too, you have to think of everything.

Hopefully we won’t have to deal with malicious users. And once this system is implemented, we should have everyone trained. But still…

“Hope for the best, plan for the worst.”

Prioritizing

Someone once taught me a really simple way to prioritize your to-do list. It’s broadly applied to a lot of things.

Basically, you draw a Punnett Square, but instead of genetic traits, you use importance and urgency. So your top left will be “important, urgent”; your top right will be “important, not urgent”; your bottom left will be “not important, urgent”; and your bottom right will be “not important, not urgent”.

This, I’ve found, is a great way to make sure that everything you label “important, urgent” gets done (or at least looked at), and everything else gets ignored until it’s all-of-a-sudden important or urgent.

Combined with my tendency towards “projects“, this method is how I make it look like my office is filled with Tibetan prayer flags made from Post-Its, each of them noting something that I have deemed either “not important” or “not urgent”.