Every Tuesday night, my business partner and I have a date. A working date. It’s in our calendars for 9:00 to 10:30. The place is always the same – the basement office – so no babysitter is required. And there’s plenty of parking. We’ve had this standing date for about a year and a half, since we returned from the Business of Software conference in 2011.
I mentioned in Working Together – Part 1 how SatMP is like our second born child. Well, like our first born child whom we drive to various extracurricular activities, we need to drive this baby places too. Only, by driving, we mean staying put, and by places, we mean putting in the time. When we made this earth shattering discovery, we were both gainfully contracted i.e. day jobs, and found we had a hard time tackling our to-do list. And boy did the list grow while we were at the conference. They say the way to eat an elephant* is one bite at a time but those bites are sure tiny when you’re tired and there are competing demands like laundry and bookkeeping. The obvious time slot would have been our namesake Saturday mornings, but those are now for family activities… so during one of our lovely dinners in Boston, we committed ourselves to one whole night a week to pampering our SatMP.
And by whole night, we realistically knew it would be only an hour and a half by the time DD is tucked in, dishes are done, computers are booted up, sparks fly and before we turn into pumpkins**. Still, those 90 minutes times two people is synergy at its best. It’s uninterrupted (almost) focused coding (and stuff), software testing, blogging and Mini-Guide updating.
These standing dates are called, aptly enough, Get’er Dun.
How and when does your small business manage to get’er dun?
* no elephants are hurt at Get’er Dun nights
** no pumpkins are hurt either