Organizing Business Documentation A Critical Challenge for Entrepreneurs

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer podcast, where we work on getting better step by step professionally and personally. Let's get started. Hello and welcome back. We are continuing our series, our season. Season 21, we're actually wrapping up. I think probably this one and maybe one more episode and then we will have a maybe a surprise topic for season 22. I know it'll be a surprise to us. Maybe it will be a surprise to everybody else. But this episode, we're going to talk about organization as we're talking through just some of the things that we run into on a regular basis going through our professional lives. One of the things that is a is it's always a balance or trying to find the right balance as an entrepreneur. And I think it goes way beyond being technical and being in a technical industry, but also just entrepreneurs in general, because it does come up a lot. It's the idea of working on your business or in your business. You have to do both, but you're trying to figure out the best balance to building your brand, your business, to going out and finding customers and working with them versus doing the work that they're paying you to do. So you have a couple of things that sort of work against each other, but we don't work against each other. My name is Rob Broadhead. I am one of the founders of Developineur, Building Better Developers. And on the other side, I'm going to actually give you two names to start this time. So I'm like really spoon feeding them as we have Michael Milosz over on the other side. Say hi to everybody. Hey everyone, I'm Michael Milosz, one of the co-founders of Developineur and also founder of Envision QA. So we started in the pregame here, which you could see out on YouTube, we started talking about this a little bit. And it feels like it's a good subject for us because it's just, for one, it is something that you have to do periodically. And two, as we're recording this, we're hitting about a mid-year, the middle of the year. And it seems like everybody does this stuff. In the new year, everybody's in this like, hey, I'm going to change stuff up. I'm going to do all this, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then you sometimes have like spring cleaning fests in the, you know, sometimes as part of cleaning everything else, maybe you're like throwing some documents out and cleaning some stuff up, particularly if you are close to or involved in any sort of that educational rhythm where, you know, kids are, kids, adults and stuff like that are like graduating from a, they're finishing up a semester and they're wrapping up maybe for a summer break. And so it's easy to just like, you know, clear out, effectively clear out your locker and throw out all the crap you don't want, which usually is really almost everything that was in your locker. Now, as we get older, we don't have those rhythms as much. We have to make sure that we create those. And we do have them, I think from a technology point of view, from a software development point of view, like one of the great things that we, good markers is that we typically will have like a project or a release or something like that. Those are good contained parameters around stuff, around our documentation and our notes and our code and all those kinds of things. Now, we've talked before the code that you're creating, if you're a software developer, should be sitting in version control somewhere. And that should be just like easy to search through, tag stuff, branches, all that different topic. The other material is where we run into, I think it's easier for us to lose track of it. That other material being emails, which we've talked about many times, but now it's, in the past, it's been email and documents. Did we put together like status, even status reports that we may have design and requirements documents that we're working on. We may have had some sort of write up that we did for a demo or code review, things like that. Things that we want to, they do have a value to us moving forward because they're either a template or they are reference material that we can go back to and say, hey, we wrote this thing up and this is something we can refer back to to help us through our tasks. A good example in my most recent stuff, and we've mentioned this before as well, is we constantly just, we're constantly spinning up servers and setting stuff up, whether for a new project or promoting something out to production. In the last few days, once again, I got myself into a pickle, we'll say, because I was pushing a Django Python server behind Apache, getting that thing rolled out. I've done this now, I don't know, dozens of times in the last couple of years, but it seems like every single time I do it, it's a slightly different Linux variant. It's a slightly different library. It's always going to be a slightly different version of Python and Django. It's very sensitive. It's very fragile. And so I end up having like digging my way through all this and plus that and getting like your, making sure your SSL certificate is in the right place and making sure those are up to date and they all match. Short story long, again, one of the reasons that I can do that, or at least jumpstart it, is I have all my notes from the prior time. Now two things, there is like, I need to know where my notes are. I actually could, I organize those fairly well because I have a confluence page and then within that, it's just a link of how tos. It's almost every, and I have it from almost every customer I've had. It'll be how to set up the initial development environment or how to connect to their servers or how to, what are their, maybe it's like, what are their development standards and some things like that. It's a sort of like a one page cheat sheet. How do I get a hold of that person? It's like a one pager for that company, for that project. So you've got that, now we've got these wikis as well as our documents and our folders. And if you're like us, Michael and I in particular, I think run into a slot where you've got, and if you're a side hustler, you're going to run into this, is you've got your work work and then you've got your side hustle work and then you've probably got your family stuff and then you've got things that cross all of these and figuring out where to put stuff is very important. One, because then that way you're going to find it easier to find it. And also it's making sure that you keep that up to date, particularly as you shift maybe from when you're working more in a certain mode for your job versus your side hustle. It may be that you're in a lot of like, let's say you're in a lot of marketing mode for your side hustle for a while and then that comes up later in your business. Well, you want to make sure that you say, oh yeah, I did that before, but I did it for my side hustle and not for my business. So before I pass it over to him, it's just like, I think that it's really, it's about to me, it's about rules of thumb in a sense. It's just like, so set stuff up that you're comfortable with. One, find a tool that works for you is, and it can be, there's just so many tools out there is find something that works for you, whether you want to do a one size fits all, like a ClickUp or Monday or some of these other tools that are out there that sort of, they have everything. They'll bring, a lot of them are CRMs now, like HubSpot really started out this and has gotten more CRME where they will, a lot of them, they'll, you can route your email through there. You can have all your documents there. You can have email campaigns like your MailChimp and stuff like that can go out of there. So you can have like a one size fits all dashboard, but you may also be like me, you have different levels of stuff as you've got your like, the documents that you know you're going to use over and over again, and you want those to be pristine or close enough. Like hopefully you, your resume over your career, you're probably going to like, you know, keep touching that again and updating it and tweaking it and cleaning it up. You're also probably going to have, hopefully if you're smart, you're going to have templates. It's like, Hey, whenever I write this kind of document, like me, whenever I write a proposal, I've got a proposals folder that has got 20 years back of varying proposals. And so I can go back and pick them in various places and say like, Oh yeah, I did this. How did I do that? Save you a little bit of time. And then you also have like Slack conversations or chats or stuff like that where you want to just pull that information or raw like console sessions where I was tracking through and trying to install something and get all the right libraries in and stuff like that. So make sure that whatever it is that you use, that it works for you. And then you're going to have to spend some time with it. That's a, probably the hardest part is you have to invest some time. This is actually the in versus on your business. Part of this is working on your business is getting your infrastructure together so that you know where things are coming in and where things are going. And as a, if you're like us and you have any technology pieces to it, to your skill set and honestly now, even if you don't, there are a lot of automation tools out there. There are a lot of ways for you to figure out your general structure and then automate things to put those in the right places. You can look at like ifttt, if this then that.com. You can look at, there's make, there's a bunch of other tools out there now that are sites that are built for automation and they're built to help those that are not as technical or that want a low or zero code approach to their automation, help them figure out what, you know, everything needs to have a place and then making that automation, put those things in their place. That was a lot. So I'm going to take a deep breath for a long time. And so what are you, where are you, and maybe talk a little bit about your struggles recently, because I know this is now during here near and dear to your heart because you've just gone through a documentation cleanse of some sort. Yes. So one of the, so you've really touched on kind of the whole organization and approach, you know, you talked about Wikis, you talked about, you know, working in your business, working on your business. The problem we run into as entrepreneurs doing side hustles or even in our day to day jobs is we get busy. We go out. We have to look up things on the internet. We have to download things. We write up documentation, like Rob said, and we get our job done. But the problem is a lot of times we're under such pressure to start the next piece, to jump onto the next job. The problem is we don't reflect on what we just did. And of course, you know, with source control, we can commit that code. But all those websites we went to, all that research we did, unless you take a step back and go write up a Wiki or write up a document and keep track of all that information or put it in a read me, you're going to lose it. Because if you just continue to go on to the next project, to the next project, to the next project, you're basically either going to have one heck of a downloads folder where everything's sticking in there and you have no idea where anything is, or you're going to print out stuff. It's going to sit on your desk. It's going to clutter things up. So you need to take a pause. At a certain point, like we've discussed with the email, you don't necessarily have to have zero email in your inbox, but there are rules and structures you can put in place to organize things. So you can write up rules that, oh, I get this email from this person who goes into this folder. You can essentially do the same thing with your documentation as you work through the week. Maybe do a daily, maybe every Wednesday or every Friday, spend a few minutes, look at your downloads folder. What did I download for the week? Do I need to keep any of this? And if so, where does it belong? The other problem I've run across is, well, I do have a decent file folder, file cabinet structure online. The problem I'm running into at the moment is I just shifted companies. So I have my old Milos consulting that is now Envision QA. One of the problems I just recently ran into is I was still storing documents into Milos consulting that really needed to be in Envision QA. So I actually misfiled information that I really needed. So when I went looking for it, I couldn't find it, which unfortunately then I had to spend an hour or two digging through all my documents to find where the heck this file was. Finally found it, but that is a level of anxiety you don't want. You want to make sure that you do this sooner than later. Now, like Rob was, I like the analogy you gave of the students. You know, you're at the end of the semester, you basically clean out your locker and you keep what you want, which really most of us just throw all of our stuff away and we just move on to the next course. Unless it's something like Calculus 1, Calculus 2, things of that fun nature. Even then, it's like, do I really need that? If you're like me, I'm a little more of a pack rat when it comes to documentation. I'm always worried I will need that document or I'll need that link to that website. So I have put structures in place to kind of protect myself and keep a lot of that organized for me. One of the interesting things you can do, especially with modern browsers, is a lot of them have bookmark managers so you can create folders, you can export your bookmarks and input them into other structures. At least once a quarter, I export my bookmark, all my bookmarks to a file and I store that out in Dropbox. This works for two advantages. One, if I go work for an organization that has the system locked down, I can't log in to say my Gmail to sync my bookmarks. I can import that bookmark file and boom, I have all my bookmarks in my new system. The other thing that's interesting about it is if you export these or you actually look at the bookmark manager, you can organize your bookmarks like you can a file structure. So you can have all these nice drop downs, everything gets organized. And if you get in the habit of doing that, you start structuring your bookmarks. So as you're looking at stuff online, as you're doing your project, say Java, you go, oh, hey, this is a great topic for Java. I'll save it to my Java bookmarks folder. So now you don't necessarily have to always go Google. You can just go click your bookmarks. Okay, where are my Java topics? Oh, okay, here's the one I'm looking for. Boom, you're off and running. It's also good to put those into readme files and projects or even document those in your code as you're working on projects. There's been many times where I found this interesting solution to a problem I've had six months down the road. It's like, well, how did I fix that? Where did I find that? And then you spend another hour or two or a day trying to find that solution again. If you find an answer and it's all over the place, you can find it. If you find an answer and it's online, include that link in your code. It doesn't necessarily show that, hey, you had to go borrow from someone else to say, it's like, hey, you found the solution. This is where it is. This is how it works. Don't reinvent the wheel. Include a link, a short description, move on. Also, that gets stored in your source control. So when you commit the code, it's like, boom, hey, this is when we found it. This is where it is. And you can also find it through things like, you know, the Git repository or Bitbucket. You don't have to go into the code. You can actually just, or check out the code. I mean, you can go into the code and there's the link. You can click the link and now you can go to the site. So it makes searching for code and solutions within your own projects faster. Another thing to think about real quick is books. So we've talked about, you know, documentation working in your business. I have a lot of technical books, articles, things of that nature that I use all the time. I had a problem keeping track of them. Like I had e-readers, I would drop them on e-readers. I would basically have that with me all the time. I then started carrying them on thumb drives so that I could read them on my iPad. The problem I ran into is it's very hard from a file name to tell what a book is or what the book's about. If you download a program called Calibre, it will actually take that file or that file library and import all the metadata for all those books for you. So now all you have to do is open up Calibre and it's essentially a file structure organizer of all your digital books. So if you have like an iPad or things like that, you can still import them into those, but you can do it all from this program called Calibre. And it works for both Windows and Mac. Rob, it looked like you had something to jump in. So I'll pass it back to you. Yeah, I was actually, there's a bunch of little points there that I was as I was thinking through this, some others, and you touched on some things that are some other things that are very valuable in us having a good storage structure, particularly in the e-world, in the digital sense. One of the things to think about was, all right, I guess the first thing to think about is that being an e-horter of some sort or an e-pack rat is not really necessarily a bad thing because you're not taking up, generally speaking, you're not taking up a ton of space and space is cheap. So you can easily have a, particularly if you go beyond like the most basic stuff, you've, everybody has a Google drive effectively, and you can have a Google, Google drive attached to I think every single Gmail account you have. And it's like a terabyte or something. I got, it's a huge amount of space right now. So there's for free, you already have access to huge amount of storage space. That's cloud storage, if you're okay with cloud storage. And for the most part, there's really nothing wrong with it. I don't think so, but Google's got it. Microsoft's got it part of their, their one drive stuff. If you've got a office 365, obviously there's a box and drop box and all these other places that are out there that are really good storage, not to mention. Just spin up your, like you can go get an AWS light server and store stuff there. You know, it's not, it's going to cost you a little bit, but not a ton. Or you could even use like their S3 and use that to push, you know, some of these documents that you're never going to touch again, basically, but just put them out there. That way you've got an opportunity to get to them. So it's, it's not as the, the risk reward, the cost and the benefit of being an E pack rat is not the same as in, in real life, because we have a lot bigger, it's like we have a, it'd be like being a pack rat when you've got a huge global warehouse that you can pack rat your stuff into. And digital stuff, if you set it up even halfway, right. You can go searching for it. It may take a little bit, but that goes into one of the things that if you do this. Preemptively, like Michael mentioned, like you don't want to be looking for it when you really need it right now, you want to be able to just get that quick. You don't want to be having to restructure stuff to go find that thing you need when you need it right now. So instead, if you think this through and you have a strategy, it's like he said, it's like, you got it like, Hey, I've got a Java folder where I'm going to put on my Java links when you see one. You don't have to think it's just, it becomes habitual that you're going to be like, Oh, I'm going to throw that in my Java folder. I'm going to throw that in my Oracle folder. I'm going to throw that in my Microsoft folder, whatever it is. It just makes that whole process much cleaner and it really doesn't cost you anything anymore. So it becomes a, it's, it's part of building up a good habit. One of the things that you can do that are, that is a value of this. And Michael sort of brushed up against this is the idea of holding also binaries and older files. There's a lot of times that I've had environments that were spun up. There's, there's software I built 20 years ago that I could go still run, I think a hundred percent haven't tried in a while, but if I needed to, I could actually go like run that because I have the exact version of all of the software's there behind. Now, you know, things do age out and stuff like that, but particularly within a probably like a three to five year window, you may have like, for example, Java's one that there's just, there's always new versions, new versions, new versions, new versions. And then the tools around them, there's new versions, new versions, new versions, new versions. So if you want to go spin up an environment, the development environment you used two years ago, it may take you quite a while to find that stuff on the internet, because those people are going to be archiving stuff off. If you have your own archive, then you can control that. Last thing I wanted to throw out there was Michael was talking about, like, do a regular, you know, it's, it's that regular locker clean out and we haven't talked too much about the getting things done style of stuff, but GTD getting things done is really, it really is file system based when you, and if you spend any time you realize how much it's, it's beyond what I do, but one of the things that I found is a really good GTD habit to get into, and I've got like right on my, my wall on my desk, because it's one of those things I've been, I've gotten away from it and this is where I need to get back to it, but he, he says, basically every week there's three things you should do. You should set aside some time, regardless of what you're, whether you're an entrepreneur, whether you bake cakes, whatever it is in the GTD approach is you essentially once a week, cause you're working on sort of weekly sprints or schedules is first thing he says, get clear, which is basically like clean off your desk. It like figure out what it, what is sitting here that I need to do something with. I need either like, if it's only a take a minute, I need to do it. Or if it's somebody to file, I need to file it. And then it's get current. So it's like, what does now that I've sort of shifted that stuff off. All right. Where am I at? What am I doing? What have I got to get done? What have I got to get done next week? And then once you've sort of got the critical stuff or the high priority stuff, then it's the get creative where it's like, okay, let's think a little bit about what am I doing next week or what I want to do a week from now or, you know, two weeks from now, or what is it that I've done a lot of that I want to automate, you know, it's where do I want to work, you know, be more, a little more efficient maybe in what I do or more fine ways to improve my productivity. So it's a really simple, just make sure you have a regular time, whether it's, and it works best on a weekly basis. It may be Monday morning when you get in, or it may be Friday before you leave work or you shut down for work, depending on, you know, if you're remote, it's a little different, but it's still set yourself some time. I would say put it on your schedule, just like schedule some time, probably at least a half hour, probably an hour every week where you're just like, okay, this is my, my wrap up effectively as I, and it's, you know, I'm wrapping up the week behind the week of what I've just done. What are the couple of things I've got to get, like, what do I have to get done now, get it done, and then it's planning for the week ahead. And if you're, if you're somebody where your week just gets out of control and you need more than an hour, then take more than an hour, but it's really, it's just so that you are not stressing because you're trying to find stuff and figuring out what you're supposed to do and said, you've got a very, you know, in front of you, this is what I'm doing. This is what I need to get done. Here's what my priorities are. Final thoughts? Yeah. Along those lines, we really talked a lot about the infrastructure side of things today, working on your business and working in your business, the things we didn't get too technical on, but if you go back to some past conversations we've had, especially around the automation of your, what you're working on. So if you see a lot of repetitive as you're going through this process, you can automate some of this approach. For instance, Rob mentioned, you know, he was building those Linux servers for his applications. The trick with that, you could essentially go in and do the history and pull out all the scripts or all the command lines that you ran, store that in a wiki. So next time you can say, okay, if I'm under this environment, here are the commands I ran or even save that as a script. So these are some other things you can do to help streamline the process and organize your thoughts going forward. And I would not, it's, it may be a little more an advanced topic kind of thing, but I think the idea of like platform as code and stuff like that, particularly really like Docker environments are really not that hard. Once you, it's going to take a little investment and buy a little, I mean, it's probably maybe a couple of days that I would say almost at most to just sort of get comfortable with Docker and Docker compose and some of the, particularly if you're in very typically the same kind of environment and getting your environment spun up, because once you do, then you just, you know, basically copy and paste that script, maybe you have to change a couple of names, maybe you don't, you know, or maybe change a couple of port numbers or something like that. And then boom, you've got another environment up and that can really speed your, your ability to like jump into a new project. That being said, you can really speed our opportunity and our ability to jump into a new season if you throw some, some suggestions out there. We do have some ideas, trying to figure out where we want to go, but we are always open for whether it's a, whether it's one episode, whether it's a season, maybe you want some like multi-season arc or some kind of thing that's, that it's like, Hey, this would be really cool for you guys to cover for the next six years. We'll see how that goes, but things that are shorter, definitely. We're always looking for feedback. We're always looking to just find the better, the ways that we can better help you become better, help you help us help you a lot of helping. The old, the point is like, let's just get moving forward and grow because that's how we do these things. As we, it's just like this, just like your folder structure. If you can clean that up and make a couple of changes and it can help you be more productive, it frees up more time. It allows you to do more stuff. And then hopefully at some point allows you to spend a little more time circling back to refamp and, you know, automate again, simplify or integrate or automate. Your, your system, your filing, your, your processes. That being said, I'm going to let you process this for a little bit. We're going to go process some more caffeine and go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week. And we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to building better developers, the developer nor podcast. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts, we are there. And remember just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success.