Man, I wish I could buy time. While the company bank account is quite well equipped, I just can’t find the time for everything that gets put on my plate by me or by others. Time Management my ass, it’s Getting Shit Done™ what it’s all about and that means: Differentiate the urgent stuff from the important stuff. And then do the latter.
I have to admit that I struggle to keep that in mind all the time. There are always many unplanned things that threaten to become serious distractions, be it a call from a customer in need of some hand-holding, a disrupted IT service or a sudden stroke of genius that of course should be worked out immediately. I try to be a good GTD disciple, but instead of a “mind like water”, my mind every so often resembles more a flushing toilet.
Starting a business means starting a new way of learning. I’m amazed what amount of things I’ve learned since I started planning my business in late 2009. After relearning things I had forgotten already and acquiring new knowledge about topics I had only heard about from my directs at my previous job as an IT manager, my sysadmin knowledge today is at a new height. At the moment, I’m doing heavy in-depth reading about MySQL performance and MySQL high availability concepts.
Working with clients is another great learning arena. There’s the client that first consumes a lot of support effort (“How do I create an SSH key?”, “Please help me install git on Windows!”, “Can you explain to me what the Features module is and how I use it?”) and then cancels during the test month nevertheless. There’s the customer that enjoys explaining to me how we should do our job. And there’s the client that is pure pleasure to cooperate with and pays their bills a year in advance.
I’m happy to have closed the deal of sponsoring the Drupal-Initiative, the german equivalent of the Drupal Association. All their websites are going to be ported to a DrupalCONCEPT Drupal cluster and we in return will be mentioned as their hosting sponsor.
My next action will be an email newsletter to all my Drupal contacts. I’m unsure how successful this will be, but I’m afraid there are a lot of people that haven’t yet heard of DrupalCONCEPT and I’m definitely going to change that.
And with that, I’ll return to doing important things!