This week at JDHQ – 2026-06-01

Originally sent to the mailing list.

As we prepare for a Big Move tomorrow, I can feel the energy levels wane. This is how we work these days, our life measured in phases: we Move To A Place, there’s a time of Great Disruption, we get settled, then we Work Hard And Do Little Else For A Long Time. Coming to the end of that final phase – let’s call it 10 weeks of 6-days-a-week – is a relief. It’s needed.

Tomorrow we fly to Taiwan. So we’ll spend a week Figuring Out The New Place: where to get a healthy, cheap breakfast. Where to buy the things we couldn’t bring with us: scissors, aerosols. How to get around; where to walk; where to work. It’s fun and, faced with a new place, I typically walk around wide-eyed with wonder as Lucy steers me out of the path of traffic.

This is also the one-year anniversary of us living on the road. It’s both exhilarating, and exhausting. So we might stretch out next week and have a bit of a holiday. We need to see and walk in trees and grass and birds; take small regional trains to towns with no attractions. If this email doesn’t turn up next Monday, that’s why.

Small Business System annual calendar

The big news this week is that we’re introducing an annual ‘maintenance calendar’ for SBS: the idea is that you ‘touch’ every part of your business over the course of a year, just giving it a look. Tidy it up, make sure that the essentials are there. Did your compliance certificate expire without you realising? Now’s the time to spot that and fix it up.

This shouldn’t take more than 45 minutes every couple of weeks, but by this time next year you’ll have a really nice awareness of the entire business, and a comfort that can only come from knowing that you’ve at least looked at it all.

To support this, there are now weekly sessions in the SBS events calendar that run in perpetuity. They alternate Tuesday/Thursday (in my Asian timezone) and morning/evening each week. The first is on Thursday June 18th – this is the slot that’s best for the Europeans and Asia/Oceania, where it’s the morning/afternoon of that day. The following week’s Tuesday 23rd slot works best for the Americas, where it’s afternoon/evening on Monday 22nd. Over the course of a month, there should be a slot to suit everyone.

I’ll be using the maintenance calendar to drive these meetings and, of course, you can bring any ad-hoc questions. See the blog post for more information, and let me know if you’d like to be in my trial group for the tracker shown.

What we did last week

j.