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The Resilient Entrepreneur, Edition #85

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Hi there

I hope you had a great week!

Here are the topics in today's edition:

• Don’t Trust the Time Management Gurus
• The Compliance Trap: Stop Pretending Your Team Read the PDFs

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

Talk soon 👋
Tom

LEADERSHIP FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS

Don’t Trust the Time Management Gurus

No single time management technique will work for every scenario. And no single time management technique will survive your entire career.

​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 constantly distracted by team members asking if you have a minute, or customers calling with something that could have waited for the next regular meeting.

What Can You Do?

As the Founder & CEO of Yonder, a B2B SaaS company, I have experimented with multiple time planning techniques over the years.

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.

You see, it’s not just about pro or contra time-blocking. As usual with reality, it’s a little more difficult.

Here is my latest approach to balancing 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 Calendly doesn’t fill up my day. In this way, I can work on tasks that require clear thinking; for example, clearing to-do lists, preparing meetings, and cleaning up my mailbox.

Tech Blocker Days

For some tasks, my concentration days are not quiet enough. It’s those tasks that shape the future of our product: Writing specifications, working on the product roadmap, trialling new technologies.

As most of those tasks are not urgent, I cluster them in what I call tech blocker days: Once a month, I block off three working days with no meetings. I usually hide in the mountains just by myself, working on large tech tasks. It’s not uncommon for me to forget the time and work from dawn to dusk.

It’s incredible how far you get in three days when you can work completely undisturbed. But at the end of every tech blocker session, I eagerly look forward to seeing my team and my family again.

Conclusion

Don’t believe the management gurus. No single time planning technique will work for every scenario. And no single time planning technique will survive your entire career.

I have been continually adapting my time planning techniques over time, mixing different approaches and also having the courage to let go of obsolete techniques.

Just like your business probably doesn’t look and work the same as it did 10 years ago.

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LIFE HACKS FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS

The Compliance Trap: Stop Pretending Your Team Read the PDFs

Compliance isn’t about documents in inboxes—it’s about clarity, proof, and making regulations work in real life.

“Can you confirm you have read the new guidelines on expenses?”

“As a supplier, you need to disclose your internal AI guidelines, including read&sign reports of your team.”

“Before the start of each shift, I need to be sure that all team members on the shift have read and signed all new ops infos relevant for their job.”

“The auditor wants to know that we covered all the ISO norms’ paragraphs in our quality management documentation.”

Sounds familiar? I’m sure it does. Compliance is omnipresent nowadays, regardless of the size of your organization. If you’re operating in a regulated industry or even in a public sector organization, compliance sometimes goes over the top. But irrespective of your personal taste, compliance is a fact nowadays.

What can you do? Let’s examine two different aspects of compliance and how to address them effectively.

Keeping Your Team Up to Date

The Paper Days

In the good old paper days, “read&sign” was the way to make sure everybody read the relevant documents. During my university days some 25 years ago, I worked as a ground handler at the local airport. Whenever I reported for a shift, I had to read through the new sheets in the ops info folder and sign the confirmation sheet. In this way, I confirmed to my employer that I had read all the ops info.

That was “read&sign” in its true sense. Read a piece of paper, then sign a confirmation sheet.

The PDF Days

With the shift to electronic documentation that followed from 2010 onwards, read&sign shifted from the briefing room folder to personal inboxes:

PDF documents made it possible to distribute vast amounts of information almost free of charge, but the sheer volume of information overloaded end-users. Read&sign, now called end-user compliance, became a farce for management to cover their backs.

Sending PDF instructions to your workforce has another problem. People will mark important passages in the document and save a copy to their desktop. When you send them a new version of the same document later, you can’t be sure if they replaced that old version on their desktop. Even if they claim that they have read and signed the new document version.

What can you do?

I suggest using a truly electronic read&sign solution where your team can read documents directly in the read&sign application rather than in emails. Let’s call this end-user compliance.

By doing so, you can achieve multiple benefits at the same time:

• You can be sure that your team always has the latest version of a document available. Operating on an outdated version that was saved to a team member’s desktop is then a thing of the past.
• Your team cannot just access your documents on their desktops or in their email inbox, but through a mobile application when they’re on the go. This will increase the readership of your documents for all your non-office team members. Think assembly lines, maintenance personnel, and the like.
• You can track read&sign through a compliance report directly in the application, neatly ordered by teams. That’s much easier than receiving dozens of emails from your team members, saying that they have read the documents.

PDF documents are a good tool to communicate simple and short internal guidelines, work instructions, and processes. However, if you have long and complex technical documents such as a 4000-page Airbus manual, a more structured format such as XML might be more suitable. But that’s a story for another day.

Satisfying the Auditors

Keeping the team up to date is just one part of the equation. If you do it, you can show your auditor that you kept your team well-informed, and who has read the updates when. But how would you prove to your auditor that your internal guidelines, work instructions, and processes comply with all the relevant norms, laws, and standards?

That’s where regulation compliance enters the scene. And that’s when the PDF is the wrong tool. Let’s dig a little deeper here.

Normative References

Do you know what the term “normative reference” means? Most people don’t, and they can’t be blamed for it.

A normative reference is a reference to a paragraph in a norm or a standard, which you can use in your documentation to show that you implemented all the requirements in the corresponding norm or standard paragraph. So in essence, a normative reference is a link between your internal documentation and a paragraph in a norm, law, or standard.

Typically, normative references are placed directly in the text of the internal documentation, for all the readers to be visible.

In the ISO 9001/27001 world, normative references have simple formats such as “4.2”, “A.12” or the like.

In aviation, normative references can be much more complicated, looking anything like “ORO.GEN.200” or “ORO.FTL.120”.

And now, because people don’t have the right tools, they stick those normative references all over your documentation, just to be sure to be prepared for an audit.

But 99% of your team looks at those normative references with puzzled faces. That’s because normative references only matter to your compliance and quality teams.

Make It Actionable

Don’t think of your internal documents as single documents, but as a collection of individual modules or blocks. Now, you can start linking each block to any other block — irrespective of whether this is a link within your documentation, or if this is a link to a paragraph in a norm, law, or standard.

The nice thing about software is that you don’t have to show the link to everyone if it doesn’t apply to everyone. You just show it to the people in charge of regulatory compliance.

And when you have a link between the relevant normative reference and your internal documentation, you can make that link actionable: Whenever the normative reference is updated, you get an automated change request to update your internal documentation. No more findings in audits that you didn’t implement the latest changes in regulations.

Reporting

How can you know if you’ve covered all the relevant normative references? A link report can answer the following questions:

• “For a certain norm or standard, show me in which document I can find all the normative references.”​
  In this way, you can easily find out if you missed one single normative reference in your documentation, or if a new version of a norm or standard has received additional normative references.
• “For a certain document of my documentation, show me all the normative references I am referring to.”
  ​In this way, you find out immediately which norms or standards govern your internal documentation.

Your auditor will be impressed.

Conclusion

In today’s world, compliance is a given. At times, it can feel overwhelming, especially if you operate in a highly regulated industry or in the public sector.

However, there is a pragmatic way: Address compliance step-by-step. Identify your biggest pain point and solve this first. Is it end-user compliance or regulatory compliance? Then, only address the second-biggest pain point once you have solved the biggest pain point.

This step-by-step approach has only one caveat: When you choose a software tool for your compliance needs, make sure it’s capable of handling both end-user compliance and regulatory compliance. Otherwise, you’ll be stuck after the first step.

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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 write about entrepreneurship, leadership, and crisis management.

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

Do you like this perspective? Here’s what you can do next:

📌 Back the signal, not the noise — authentic stories by a person, not AI.

📌 Go deeper with my eBooks — practical guides for tough times.

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