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Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Fun with Employees

It IS fun to have employees.

My list of things to do is getting shorter. It's very very long (and I am not declaring open season for anyone to put trivial things on my list), but it has never gotten shorter before. [Note: there is a very specific ... and TOUGH ... process by which something gets on my list. Also note, I'm not talking about the list of 3 bazillion things I'd kinda like to do, or somebody asked me to do but we're not going to do, or the rest of that stuff, although if my "real list" gets short enough it's possible some of the stuff from the "maybe someday" list could move over.)

Most of this is due to my having Vanessa and Matt to delegate things to. Also, since Steve Petrick now has Mike to delegate warehouse stuff to, there is more Steve Petrick time available for me to get him to do things that would take me longer to do. (For example, it used to be that Steve Petrick did all the quality checks on shipments of miniatures, and did all the shrinkwrapping, and did most of the orders and game assembly. Now, Mike does all of the quality checks, all of the assembly except when we have a new release and everybody has to help, all of the shrinkwrapping, and almost all of the order packing. That has given Steve Petrick tons of time to do stuff for his own SFB projects and to help me with other projects.)

It's also eliminated a source of worry. For years, when somebody said "can you do ...." my response was, far too much of the time: "No, I don't know how, or I don't have time, or I just don't want to, but I'll spend the next hour doing nothing other than making myself upset that people are upset that it wasn't done."

Now, I can just put things like that on the list for somebody else to do. I have a file on my computer that lists things for Matt and Vanessa (and me and Mike and Petrick and Leanna) to do. Every morning, I print out the Matt List and the Vanessa list and put those on their desks. All day, those lists stay open on my desktop and as I find things I need done or other people ask me to have something done or tell me something needs to be done, I just add it to their lists for the next day.)

It's good to have employees. I don't know why I waited so long to have them.