I am reviewing my business activities in these days so to develop a more orderly and effective way of managing them. I also need to recruit some help that can take over some of the things I am still doing personally and that absorb too much time. I have discovered that in order to do [...]

Today I spent some quality time with my wife Maria in reviewing my business and setting the objectives for the year to come. It has been an important moment because, despite all the things to do, I have taken the time to actually stand back and review everything I do or that I could do [...]

Today everybody was shopping all around, yet for me, aside from buying a trampoline for my kids, it was business as usual. I was inside one of the house we have finished rehabbing recently and I was checking the last items and designing the layout of the external lights so to make the house stand [...]

Today it is black Friday and the whole North American nation launches into the holiday season with a shopping event that has no comparison elsewhere. Yesterday I went to some shops and noticed that everything had been prepared for this major event. You had whole isles closed out and big cardboard packages full of new [...]

The holiday season is upon us and the mind goes to this incredible year and the incredible challenges and opportunities that came with it. And I have a confession to make: once upon a time I was a well paid technical journalist, people would depend on my articles to know what was hot and what [...]

The success of a business or a project can be measured by the reach of the effects it can create. When you can establish relationships and cause effects at a very great distance, then you know that you are on the right track and you have a role to play. During the next weekend, in [...]

Yesterday I spent some time with my family at a carnival in the parking lot of the biggest local mall. Our attention was captured by the game where you drop a coin hoping that the scooping movement of a sliding mirror will make many more coins and gadgets fall on the table in front of [...]

Today I had a very interesting experience with my family. We wanted to take a day off and we had the simple plan of going fishing on a dock not far from where we live. My kids love fishing and we just made a short detour because me and my wife had been looking for [...]

We live in a very fast paced culture. Everything happens in minutes or seconds, and the speed of implementation is everything. But sometimes our actions start to lose contact with reality, maybe we made some mistake and continue doing it because we don’t know better or simply we don’t want to admit to it. The end result is that our direction of travel gets gradually off the correct target and we start doing other things that have nothing to do with our real business or we need to keep correcting things that seem to go wrong all the time.

Action can become frantic at this point and the faster we proceed the further away we get from our intended destination. I believe everyone of us has had this experience in greater or lesser degree and when we try to take a shortcut to solve the situation or we use some new “idea” to get it all fixed up we end up into more trouble. It doesn’t need to be a huge thing, even a minor deviation is going to affect our performance and well being.

It has happened to me over and over again. You get that feeling of pressure creeping up on you. Things seem to get more difficult and you lose time on all kind of small details because others don’t do what they are supposed to. Well it is time to step back and have a good look at what you are doing and how you have setup your activity. There is probably something basic which went wrong and you need to put it back into shape.

For one thing you need more help because you have gotten too deep into the detail of your work while you should be making sure the ship is sailing in the right direction. So selecting somebody who can help you and defining exactly what she could do would be one step that would bring a lot of order into the situation because it would force you to analyze and systematize your work to the point that somebody else can do it.

Once you already have the help in place, maybe you have it already, and you find yourself spending a lot of time explaining her what to do, then it is time to write up a system: a manual by which she can perform what she needs to do without you having to explain it is every time. It will take you longer to write down the manual, but once you have done it, she will be able to go back at it over and over and clarify any point she might not have understood.

Make sure you include everything she need to know, don’t give anything for granted. You can also just record your actions while you perform your work, with a camera or with a video capture software, if you work on a computer. This will also allow you to find out what you need to know or understand that you haven’t understood fully yet about your business.

Roberto Mazzoni

Until 2006, anybody in the US who could breathe could get a loan for buying a house. Many people took advantage of the situation and created the foreclosure mess that is still affecting the overall national economy as well as producing international repercussions. The deregulation that consented to bring the real estate exchanges to level [...]