August 6: Grab bag of suchness

On August 6, 2019, Kasie and Shennice talked about a little bit of everything. Here are some show notes that don’t really match the show:

Theme for day:

Um…..

Agenda review:

• July wrap up / review
• Record Keeping / Documentation / Journaling

Segment 1:

We spent the entire month of July on consulting as a business and I think we’ve pretty much covered it all. 

• With Vanessa we talked about building the CRC Academy cohorts and having the five enrolled consultants work together to learn from one another. 
• With Adrienne we talked about inventory and pricing and how you can determine how much a service should be sold for and really how to package your services into products. 
• With Stephanie we talked about building your business processes and organizing systems so you can grow. 
• And with Ann we talked about perceived value and real value and how consultants can communicate the value they bring to their clients.
• Last week we went through Ikigai and the four circles of the Venn diagram where you can identify your passion, purpose, mission, etc. Check out last week’s notes for the diagram.

The visit with Ikigai reminded me of our time with Born to Build back in the fall. I revisited that episode and reminded myself that it’s got four parts to it:

• Creating Self Awareness
• Recognizing Opportunities
• Activating on Ideas
• Building a Team

I thought there must be some overlap or synthesis between Ikigai and Born to Build, especially because you used some of that vocabulary, Shennice, the “I’m a connector” comment while we were talking about finding your passion and your vocation versus profession.

The Opportunity Journal described in that episode started with:

• Your talent
• Your learning curve
• Your performance

It was about assessing opportunities when they come your way. In The R.O.A.D. Methodology, we do this in the second stage. We focus on a single, solveable problem and then we narrow the scope of work to address that one thing. 

The Opportunity Journal says to list all of the possible projects and then rate them in those three categories — your talent, your learning curve, and your performance — to decide which ones are the “low hanging fruit” So this is just another way of assessing the work you’re doing right now and whether it’s moving you closer to your goals.

So all that got me thinking about record keeping and journaling and documenting. When we come back, let’s jump into a discussion on the tools we use to organize ourselves and our work.

Segment 2

Labels labels everywhere. Are you what they say you are? How do you assign labels to yourself? Should you? How do you know when the label has run its course?

Conferences are about content. Pick your sessions for what you can learn from them. Be purposeful. Be intentional. Get what you paid for.

Segment 3

My Monday work for CRC is always catching up with everything I did last week and setting the stage for this week. We have plans in mid-execution right now and recording progress on those plans is a job in and of itself sometimes.

We use Trello for the organization of a lot of our work. It’s a good project management app though I’m told Monday is better. We use Slack to communicate within the team. We use Google drive for document storage and co-editing and sharing. I use Summit for a task list and it integrates with my calendars. 

Sometimes the tools we use can be too complicated and cumbersome. I have Outlook for email and it’s supposed to marry all of my accounts into one interface but it frequently chokes on passwords and verifying server connections and such.

We’re working on putting together an online learning platform and right now we’re working with Wix but we’ve had recommendations of Kajabi and others. It can be hard to decide which services to use.

How do you choose?

In software projects we do needs assessments and then try to fit applications to the organization’s requirements. Do you think you could do a requirements gathering exercise on your organization to identify what technology needs you have?

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