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The Resilient Entrepreneur, Edition #51

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Hi there

I hope you had a great week!

Here are the topics in today's edition:

• Time-Blocking: Productivity Hack or Teamwork Killer?
• How to Master Asset Management in JIRA in 6 Easy Steps
• Entrepreneurs Must Choose: Busy Work or Building the Future?

Please reach out if you have comments, questions, or suggestions for articles!

Talk soon 👋
Tom

KickKerK

LEADERSHIP FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS

Time-Blocking: Productivity Hack or Teamwork Killer?

Rather than using time-blocking unconditionally or not at all, separate your work time into beehive days, concentration days, and travel days. And be prepared that days morph from one category into the other.

Time-blocking or not?

Notifications on or off?

Make yourself available for every request of your team or not?

As usual in entrepreneurship, there isn’t black or white. There is always a sensation or a distraction for an entrepreneur to attend to, so you will need to find a way to resist the temptation of all the distractions.

It’s good to be helpful for your team and your customers. At the same time, precious little gets done when you are distracted all the time by team members asking if you have a minute, customers calling with something that could have waited for the next regular meeting, or random people still doing cold calling marketing.

Here is an analogy: Parkinson’s Law says that administration fills the room you give it: If you allow your day to be eaten by administrative tasks, they will fill your whole day. If you dedicate only one hour to those same tasks, you’ll get all of them done in just one hour.

It’s the same when you are available for your team all day. Then you will be taken hostage by whatever urgency the team brings to you, and you won’t be able to work on the tasks an entrepreneur has to work on.

Conversely, if you are never available for your team, you might get your work done, but lose your team. So you end up being a solopreneur, not an entrepreneur.

I’ve been at Yonder’s helm since its very first day. In the beginning, being available for the team and still getting work done was easy — heck, in the very early days, I shared the office with just two other people. Now we have a 25-person team spread across 15 time zones, and somebody always wants to talk.

The time-blockers amongst you will argue that time-blocking is a productivity technique that helps people get lots of stuff done. This is true in crisis — it helped me cope with an extremely intense period of time during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic.

On the other hand, time-blocking makes you inaccessible to your team. In our company, all calendars are visible by default. My co-founders and our first employees know me well enough to overbook my calendar when I blocked some time to get stuff done, so using time blocking didn’t encourage them to interact with me whenever it was necessary. However, nowadays, not everybody knows me well enough to feel comfortable overbooking my calendar. This is problematic when you have a packed schedule all the time — some people will then never get the opportunity to speak to you.

In my time-blocking days during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, I would typically get impatient towards the end of the meeting — the next meeting or task was waiting. So I would often wrap up a discussion before a real solution was found, just because I had to rush off.

Our best ideas all appeared during creative discussions with my coworkers, either in impromptu discussions or on a walk in the mountains. This is true for technical, commercial, and organizational topics. How would you possibly find time for impromptu discussions or walks in the mountains when time-blocking defines your day?

You see, it’s not just about pro or contra time-blocking. Like so many productivity fads, it ain’t that simple.

Here is how I try to balance the team and my work.

Beehive Days

I typically spend Monday to Wednesday in our Zurich office. Arriving early, holding regular meetings, having informal chats at the coffee maker, placing phone calls with customers and prospects, and getting lots of unforeseen tasks done. These are my beehive days, and I don’t even aspire to get any work done that requires clear thinking or full concentration.

I end my beehive days being dead tired, and it’s not uncommon for me to fall asleep earlier than the kids.

Concentration Days

On most Thursdays and Fridays, I work from home. Those days are quieter than the first half of the week, plus I have added an extra layer of security: I block my calendar so that Hubspot and Calendly don’t fill up my day. In this way, I can work on tasks that require clear thinking or full concentration.

For me, that’s typically product work — writing specifications, working on the roadmap, clustering bugs, and planning sprints.

Travel Days

So much for the theory. Enter travel. Business travel is usually short notice, no matter how far you have to travel. In my career, I had to attend an RFP presentation during the Easter holidays in Southeast Asia, fly to the Middle East multiple times on Saturdays as they start the work week on Sunday, or learn upon my landing from the United States that my on-site presence was needed again the following week.

Travel days require extra planning efforts because the regular meetings won’t go away just because you travel. Furthermore, according to my experience, there is always something that goes wrong during travel, so be prepared to replan your travel days multiple times. Canceled meetings, delayed flights, traffic jams in a foreign city, you name it.

Conclusion: From Concentration to Travel Day

Sometimes, my Concentration Days suddenly feel like Travel Days or Beehive Days, because a single phone call changes everything:

​Urgent bug.​

New RFP being published.

​A water leak in the office.​

So when that happens, I always remind myself that changes of plan are part of the game on Travel Days, and then I declare the day a Travel Day.

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LIFE HACKS FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS

How to Master Asset Management in JIRA in 6 Easy Steps

Are you looking for the easiest way to set up asset management in JIRA for your ISO 27001 certification? Follow the steps in this cheat sheet, and you will be done in very little time and with very little cost.

Here is a step-by-step setup guide for your asset management in JIRA.

Before you start: What is an asset in the context of the ISO 27001 norm?

The asset inventory is often misunderstood as an endless list of every single laptop, printer, and iPad in your company. Whilst hardware certainly is an asset category, it is just one of many — but what about contracts, patents, insurance, and employee knowledge? Ask yourself two questions before you start designing your asset inventory:

• What information asset categories do we have in our company, both tangible and intangible?
• Which of these information assets create value for our company, and therefore need to be protected?

The ISO 27001:2022 norm does not mandate a specific form for the asset inventory, so make use of this freedom and limit yourself to asset categories that are vital to your business.

1. Set up a new JIRA project

Set up a new JIRA project for your risk management — in our company, we call it “asset inventory”, and we use the standard JIRA software project template.

I assume you have administrator privileges in your JIRA tenant and am therefore not covering the required steps to get administrator privileges.

2. Define JIRA statuses for your assets

All your assets will be JIRA tickets. Since every JIRA ticket must have a status, you need to define the statuses you want to use to track your assets. In our company, we have chosen the following statuses:

• In Preparation: The phase-in of an asset is ongoing, e.g. a new software component is in integration, or a contract is in negotiation.
• Up To Date: The asset is in service, and no action is required as the asset is up to date.
• Update Required: The asset is in service, but it needs action to keep it up to date, e.g. a patching of a software component, or an additional amendment for a contract.
• In Decommissioning: It was decided to decommission an asset, e.g. decommissioning a software component or terminating a contract. However, the asset is still active at the moment.
• Decommissioned: Once an asset becomes inactive, it is decommissioned.

These statuses are configured in the Kanban Board Settings as displayed below.

3. Create a JIRA ticket for each asset

Now it’s time to create a JIRA ticket for each asset in your company. We have created a new issue type “assets” and defined a few custom fields for each asset:

• Expiry Date: How long can we use the asset? (this applies mainly to contract assets, but can also be useful for procured services)
• Termination Date / Termination Period: When do we need to terminate the asset if we intend to decommission it? (this applies mainly to contract assets, but can also be useful for procured services)
• Contract Number: What is the unique external identification number of the asset? (this applies mainly to contract assets, but can also be useful for procured services)
• Serial Number: What is the unique external identification number of the asset? (this applies mainly to hardware and software assets)
• Installed Version: Which version of the asset is currently installed on productive systems? (this applies mainly to software assets)
• Available Version: Is there a newer version of the asset available than currently installed on productive systems? (this applies mainly to software assets)

While this might sound like too much information, collecting all that information helps you get an accurate picture of assets and generate meaningful dashboards.

4. Create a JIRA epic for each asset type

JIRA tickets belonging to the same topic can be grouped into epics. We have defined an epic for each asset type in the company, where we went beyond the classic hardware asset school of thought:

• Commercial Contracts — Customer
• Commercial Contracts — NDA
• Commercial Contracts — Partners
• Commercial Contracts — Services
• Commercial Contracts — Software
• Employee Know-how
• Communication Channels
• IT — Hardware
• IT — Infrastructure
• Insurance
• Intangibles
• Miscellaneous

Again, I wouldn’t recommend copying the above epics without customizing them for your organization.

5. Link assets and epics

Now link each asset to an epic, and you will get your first overview of all the (reported) assets in your company by using JIRA’s roadmap feature.

Here is an excerpt of our asset roadmap:

The green bar indicates decommissioned assets, the blue bar indicates assets in service, and the grey bar indicates assets in preparation.

6. Create a dashboard

Most startups and SMEs will create static asset overviews, which are not actionable. I prefer dynamic dashboards much more, which is why we created a JIRA dashboard with the most important asset metrics, whereas a click on each element allows us to drill down on the underlying asset tickets.

We use the following dashboard elements in our asset inventory:

• Assets — In Preparation
• Assets — Update Required
• Assets — In Decommissioning
• Upcoming termination dates in the next three months
• Upcoming expiry dates in the next six months

These dashboard elements help us never miss required updates, contract terminations, etc. again. Here is what they look like:

And that’s it. There is no more to do to produce an effective, dynamic, and actionable asset management system that is tailored to your organization!

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INSPIRATION FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS

Entrepreneurs Must Choose: Busy Work or Building The Future?

Software standardization, grooming potential investors, or building partnerships: These tasks are essential for any startup that enters the growth phase, but it’s easy not to do them because entrepreneurs’ time is eaten away by the urgencies of the day.

“My calendar is packed, I won’t have the chance to look into your request until next week.”

“My team doesn’t have the resources to work on this right now.”

“Thank you for your message. I am out of the office and cannot access my mailbox, but I will get back to you after my return.”

I’m sure you have heard or read such statements before. And in many cases, they are justified. But as an entrepreneur, you often don’t have the luxury of not attending to important tasks because of resource constraints.

To be clear, I am not an advocate of round-the-clock work, working during vacations, and the like.

But let’s distinguish between urgent tasks and important tasks here. Urgent tasks, for example, ugly bugs or medical issues in your team never trigger the above statements, neither in large nor in small companies. But what about important but not urgent tasks? I am thinking of software standardization, grooming potential investors, or building partnerships. These tasks are essential for any startup that enters the growth phase, but it’s easy not to do them because entrepreneurs’ time is eaten away by the urgencies of the day.

So what can we do?

1. Reduce Busy Work

It’s easy to claim you are busy, but not getting any work done. Think of admin work: It can easily fill your day, making you look busy, but you don’t create any value at all during the entire day. Similarly, you can spend hours moving, assigning, and commenting on tickets and claim that you are prioritizing.

If you reduce that busy work to the bare minimum, you will have lots of time to work on important but not urgent tasks. When people still don’t work on the important tasks, they probably don’t give a f**k. Unfortunately, that’s the most common source for important work not getting done. There is no shortcut here, if you don’t give a f**k about the important tasks in your company, I’m afraid you will have to change jobs.

2. Time-Blocking

Busy work is an easy target, and it’s not the only villain in organizational life. To work on long-term, important topics, you need to be undisturbed. Call it time-blocking or Focus Fridays, regularly setting aside some time for non-urgent but important tasks will help you build a great business over time. Just like regular payments into your savings account will build a fortune over time.

I often hide in the mountains to work on non-urgent but important tasks. It gives me the quiet and isolation that’s needed to make meaningful progress. But beware, don’t fall into the busy work trap because nobody watches you in your isolation.

3. Accept Good Solutions, Reject Perfect Solutions

So you finally conquered busy work, locked yourself away from the daily hustles, and found some time to work on software standardization, grooming potential investors, or building partnerships.

The biggest danger? Exaggerated ambitions. Many people are hidden perfectionists. They spend their focus time on thinking about the perfect standardization of software, grooming every single potential investor out there, or building partnerships with 200 different partners. They compile huge to-do lists for their perfect solutions, rather than doing a simple thing:

Start implementing the first step.

Just reduce one little non-standard thing from your software. Make the code changes today, and continue with the next step tomorrow.

Customize your pitch deck for one potential investor, spend some time researching that potential investor, and craft a personal email to the investor. Then, move on to the next potential investor tomorrow.

Work out a proposal on how mutual value could be created for one potential partner, and engage in a discussion with that potential partner.

The world is not perfect, but if you regularly spend time to remove all those little imperfections over a long time, the world will be much closer to perfection than if you waste your time on busy work.

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About Me

Growing a company 📈 in uncertain times 🔥🧨 is like running a marathon—it demands grit, strategy, and resilience.

As a tech entrepreneur 💻, active reserve officer 🪖, and father of three 👩👦👦, I share practical insights and experience on entrepreneurship and resilience in The Resilient Entrepreneur, my weekly newsletter.

When I'm not solving problems, I recharge and find inspiration in the breathtaking mountains 🏔️ around Zermatt 🇨🇭.

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