when starting a (side) Business
Recently – after purchasing a tool for video editing – I decided to go over some of the videos in our first course and edit out some ‘euhms’ and other distracting noises. Thanks to the new software it turned out to be rather easy, but as it goes with these kinds of projects, I still ended up spending half a day on this task. We had decided some time ago to make the video’s shorter and split them up in another segment. So I uploaded the video into the software to split at the point we decided. Only to find out, the slide referred to in my notes, was not in the video … And then I realized. I had made a new version of that video with more slides … I just spent that afternoon working on an outdated version of that video. And all of this because I hadn’t organized myself properly yet.
The lesson I learned – even when working for yourself – the time spent organizing yourself, your administration and your products – is time well spent. Let this small painful situation not just be a learning moment for myself, but an opportunity for you to decide here and now to get yourself organized.
Here are some tips to help you become better Organized:
- Realize that a few items/documents/mails/projects can rapidly become a whole lot
- Decide early on how you will file/store your products
- Decide and use a naming strategy which incorporates version numbering
- Use your filing system from the start (online and offline)
- Identify and document which tool/app you use for which information
- Create a separate mailbox for products/mailing lists you subscribe to.
- Start each month with an empty mailbox. Moving the mails of the previous month to a separate folder for easy access
- Make sure to keep your accounting information up-to-date
- For courses: create an offline repository of the latest version of your complete course including pdfs and other downloadable items
Which brings me to the topic of online courses:
- Did you ever consider to share some of the knowledge you gained in your life?
- Do you realize you could help someone gain a lot of time by teaching them what you learned while trying, failing, retrying and finding how to do it
- Imagine the feeling when your knowledge allowed someone to make a change in their life.
Send an e-mail to [email protected] if you want us to help you create your first course.
Photo by Omid Kashmari Unsplash
