Thread by @joshuamschultz

Setting up operations involve tradeoffs.

Even when you don't realize it, your are giving something up with each decision.

Working with one SMB Owner who literally cant find time in the day to complete work.

It was his setup...

Small changes freed up 2 hours daily!

Example:

He made the decision that ease of information search was most important.

He made it implicitly, not purposefully.

His tradeoff?

Time and Tasks.

He traded Ease for Time, Tasks, Speed.

Every Supplier file was
- Saved in the cloud sync
- Saved in the acct software
- Saved on his personal system

Every file was renamed with the
- PO
- Invoice
- supplier name

Every file was put in one of many folders & subfolders
- some organized by name
- some by type
- or both

On top of this,

All accounting software transactions had PO/Invoice/both in the reference number.

Why go through all this saving, renaming?

So no matter where he was, and no matter what piece of information he had, he could find things very easily.

Much of this was not needed.

I am a big fan of the DRY methodology

DON'T REPEAT YOURSELF

We chose
1. 1 place to store files
2. 1 naming convention that was simple
3. Automated reference fill ins in Acct software

But next step was the biggest step...

We implemented

1. Index searching tool (think, searching like google not windows explorerer. Location doesn't matter, contents do)
2. Quick launcher to launch search from anywhere with a keyboard shortcut.

Yup... literally 6 hours saved a week over Mon, Wed, & Fri.

Take a look at your operations..

Where are you saving, logging, or overwriting information more than once.

Why?

What doesn't really matter?
What tools can make it so that step doesn't matter?
Where are you repeating yourself?

Lots of operators are pushing through tasks with brute force.

Use brute force, but put it on the right thing... not repetitive tasks that don't add value.

Sometimes making things take an extra step can free up hours per week.

[FWIW, My Take On Above]

- Storage should never be in another platform (acct software). no control of structure. only relevant for some docs. Nextcloud or Dropbox

- nomenclature should make index searching quick

- I love Alfred app for google like search of docs and contents