Q&A December 2022
A rolling Question and Answer session for December 2022
Welcome again to this month's rolling Q&A. We will take questions throughout the remainder of the week or so.
Overview
Introduction
Revision
August
September
October
November
Q&A “Household and family tech stack” - late addition
Overview (it’s process)
Shared Calendar
Messaging
Slack
Other Options (Trello)
Overview
A shorter Q&A this month due to the holiday season and we’ve been putting the focus on a series of longer form notes for subscribers to be published later this month (January 2023).
We have however collated the (largely uneventful) prior Q&A posts from 2022.
We wish you all the best for 2023 and we look forward to how we can support you. Whether that’s acting as your on-call Operations consultant for your small (but growing! side business), or helping you optimise your own zen garden of peaceful productivity unbeknownst to the distant offworld overlords of corporate tower block #371c (iv). Have a look around and feel free to ask a question.
Introduction
Here's a broad list of where we feel our expertise sits:
Recruitment (and how best to use external recruiters),
Remote work and managing remote teams
Outsourcing and managing outsourced teams and freelancers (APAC focus)
Time management (a recap + a few more Au techniques)
Time management and processes for sales & sales roles
Managing stakeholders in family business' (carry the donkey)
How to design process (broadly)
Having said that if we'll always take a look and if something is outside our wheelhouse we'll do our best to refer out to another BowTied or somewhere that can assist you.
As always if you'd prefer to submit (more) anonymously, you can reach us via
bowtiedhippopotamus@gmail.com
Or on the bird app (Direct Messages welcomed)
@BowTiedHippo_
Revision
Q&A
An edit to the post for visual clarity. Response will be a bit rougher and less polished, or perhaps not. Who knows: not us.
Q
What apps / programs do you recommend for family business planning for tasks, to-do lists, shopping lists, etc that is shareable and updatable in real time?
Overview
As always, our first point here is going to be that your focus needs to be on your processes first (and your people!!), and your technology second. Not to glibly overstate this but buy-in from the family members / your partner / Mrs Farmer is beyond crucial here. If you don’t emphatically have that, reading any further than this sentence will be beyond detrimental.
Good to go? Let’s proceed.
In terms of scope and scale – let's make some assumptions here.
We're talking about a family coordinating and managing themselves with perhaps some children of varying ages ?
We’re not talking about a typical family business with the usual:
patriarch
matriarch
exasperated eldest daughter
fuck-wit son
useless son-in law
relatively switched on daughter in law
the corporate board comprised of family friends with big dreams of equity payouts
3 family friends who are employees
ex-daughter in law who is still an employee and
the other15 odd long serving / suffering staff
We’re assuming that your family is under 10 people or so
What you need to get done mainly has a domestic focus, with some farm related / farm work thrown in
Shared Calendar
This is going to be part of the backbone of your process.
We'd recommend Google calendar as it can run on both Android & Iphone (not sure what you're using) and desktop if you need. While theoretically you can have different calendar apps that integrate with each other (ie. iCal , Google, Samsung etc.) there's sometimes a risk that it won't sync or update properly.
This is important because if something isn't in the calendar: it doesn’t exist.
You’ll need a really strong process to get things in there, get it updated and get it reviewed and keep it updated. The review part is really important, every time you look at the calendar you need to have absolute confidence that you're looking at the most up to date information you have.
Here's where you sketch out the month horizon (lightly) and get the week planned right – this is the where you mark in the P&T association meeting, the Church fundraiser and raffle, the sleepover, the trip to town for shopping, the vet visit etc.
On a side note – paper calendars and planners can work just as well if you're a bit more old school / traditional. At the end of the day it's the strength of your process and how well it shapes and directs information (see here actually - crtl f for “calendar”)
A Messaging Application
You likely have one of these already – be it text messaging, WhatsApp, Signal etc.
What we find here is that it can be difficult to use these applications effectively to either manage tasks or identify what's important. Generally the sense is that a lot of important things get lost in the constant wash of new messages.
What we can recommend here is either a really tight discipline around how messages get used (ie. 8 character max for non-task related items and Mrs Farmer can only text that she loves you once per day (these are not serious options).
At a pinch, think about using groups to silo out certain themes even if it's just messaging on one topic between two parents. This will help focus and retain the information a bit better. More detail coming soon here on this for subscribers and a lot more detail for paid subscribers.
This isn't a world away from what you're doing now- but it's a more conscious use where events are either "pinned" straight into the calendar, or certain conversations are held in certain groups to stay "on-topic"
Slack
Your other option is to use a different messaging application completely, but one that's still mobile friendly. Slack lends itself well to this allowing for DMs and groups to be created, but it's real strength is in the channels (specific topics) and threading letting you return to and cover off items.
It lends itself really well to shopping lists – the list can be edited by the person who posted it (or updated in a thread by anyone) and "ticked off" with emoji reactions. The trial version of Slack will automatically archive / delete after about 90 days which for your use case is relatively benign.
This is about the shopping list, or certain specific projects or commitments that need a bit more focus and discussion.
Other Options
Anything that requires more collaboration, review, and updates (ie. A Strategic plan, a marketing plan) probably needs cloud documents (Google docs / Microsoft365 / Onenote) . If you're running a larger operation than our above assumptions (ie. A staff of ranchers and a "few thou head of cattle" than you may need to look at the usual suspects Trello, Asana, Teamwork (more of a CRM but can do it) and other things like Notion perhaps.
The majority of families would be quite well served with just Calendar, Whatsapp & Slack. Here, however the shopping list the upper limit of real time enabled collaboration.
If you need a bit more involvement and collaboration – say a better to-do list to help keep on top of smaller family / farm tasks then something like a simple Trello board with To Do / Doing / Bottleneck (if something can't move forward without a certain input) / Done might be more suitable.
What apps / programs do you recommend for family business planning for tasks, to-do lists, shopping lists, etc that is shareable and updatable in real time?