Announcing the SBS annual maintenance calendar

Evolving the idea of 'TGIF' (Thank God I Filed it) from last year, we're launching the annual Small Business System 'maintenance calendar'.1

The idea of TGIF was that if you 'touch' your system, tidying it up a smidge, but you do that regularly ā€“ on a Friday afternoon, say ā€“ then you'll be in a much better shape than if you hadn't done that. Your life will be neater and less stressful.

SBS, spread over the year

The SBS contains everything that every small business needs to operate. So if we group it up into ~25 pieces and spread those out over the year such that they get a fortnight each, and then TGIF each of them in that fortnight, after a year we'll have touched every part of the business.

And if we do that together, on the now-weekly Zoom sessions that I've scheduled, we can keep each other honest and motivated.

Screenshot of my tracker database. Each row is an SBS group and it has a 'TGIF' date and an indication of whether my business uses this part of the SBS.

Get the tracker

I've set this up as a Baserow (online database) template. If you're an SBS member, email me and I'll work directly with the first handful of respondents. If this proves popular I'll build it into JDHQ.

This isn't 'doing the work'

To be clear, I'm not asking you to do any actual work ā€“ say, all of your 21 Products design ā€“ in this fortnight. Only that you check in with that part of your system, and to make sure that:

  • Your files are neat.
    • Archive old stuff. Make sure everything's named well.
    • Find stuff you know is missing and put it there.
  • Your JDex is in order.
    • Archive old entries.
    • Deal with those big notes that you've been putting off.

I imagine this might take 45 minutes? Really not long at all.

Starts on June 9th

I've scheduled Zoom sessions every Tuesday/Thursday morning/evening, alternating across weeks, from June 9th in perpetuity.

The first group ā€“ chosen to be an easy one ā€“ is due Friday June 26th. It's 15.10, 15.40+ Travel admin & records. See you on the call, where I'll explain in more detail.

Here's a 6-minute video with more details.

Footnotes

  1. Working title. As always, suggestions welcome. ā†©