One Small Business Dashboard for Five Companies: Why No Product Would Hold Them

Monday is a good product. So is Trello. I have used both, I have nothing bad to say about either, and I want to start there because the reason I do not use them for this has nothing to do with their quality.

Here is what they do well, and what any page that replaced them had to keep. I can get my work done inside two or three windows instead of a dozen. And I know what comes next, which means less time spent standing in the doorway between one thing and the next. Reduced liminality, if you want the word for it. That is most of what a board tool is for and they deliver it.

What neither of them could do is hold five companies at once.

Why not

Two reasons, and both of them are about ownership rather than software.

The first is account terms. A seat in most of these products covers an organization. Running several separate legal entities through one seat is either against the terms I agreed to or requires a larger plan sold for a different purpose.

The second is more important and it is the one accountants care about. If one company pays for the tool that runs all of them, that company is subsidizing the others. That is a real transaction and it belongs in somebody’s books. I hold a nonprofit among these organizations, and blurring who paid for what is exactly the kind of thing I cannot afford to be casual about.

So the shape of the problem is not that the products lack a feature. It is that the thing I need is one view across several entities, and a bought product either cannot span them or can only span them by muddying who is paying.

What the page does instead

Every organization gets the same blocks in the same order, and the order is deliberate.

Its funnel comes first, then its money. Both of those describe where the company is right now, which is the thing I need before I can decide anything.

Then what is waiting on me. Everything still open, sorted into four boxes by urgent and important. The split is Dwight Eisenhower’s, from a line he quoted about the urgent and the important seldom being the same thing; Stephen Covey popularized it decades later.

Where each company is going does not live on this page. It lives in that company’s vision and strategic plan, written down once and consulted when it needs to be, and it does not need to be restated every morning. Where each company has been lives in its log. The morning page is for the present and for what the present is asking of me.

What answering actually is

The items are numbered, and I answer by typing numbers into a chat window. That part is simple and it is not the interesting part.

The interesting part is what an answer turns out to be. In practice every one of mine is one of five things.

1. I prompt an AI to do the next thing on a task.
2. I email a team member something that has to be done by a person.
3. I do the things only I can do, by reason of authority, responsibility or ability.
4. I think about how to build somebody else up in their ability, their responsibility or their authority.
5. I defer what is left, knowing I have put in an honest day’s work.

The fourth one is the reason the four boxes matter. Growing the people I lead and serve is almost never the loudest thing on the page, and it is one of the most strategic. A sorting that only surfaced what was on fire would bury it every single day.

The thing it actually fixed

Before this page, the end of a day had three questions in it that I could not answer.

Did I put my hours into the most strategic thing, or did I get lost in busy work in one company and putting out fires in another. What did I forget. And which ball got dropped.

The third one cost me sleep.

Balls still get dropped, because I am human, the fall is still real, and Jesus has not returned. But it seems to me that fewer are getting dropped since I started working this way, and that the damage when one does drop is less severe. I cannot show you a number for that. I am telling you what it seems like from inside it, which is the only honest way I have to report it.

The part I did not expect

Every one of these companies now has a better record of its own activity, and not just its bookkeeping. Each has a clearer picture of where it is going and where it stands.

That did not come from the page being clever. It came from finally having somewhere to put what was in my head. Once there was a place for it, it went there instead of staying in my head, and what was in my head was the only copy.

• 5 organizations on one page, each asked the same questions in the same order
• 4 boxes, urgent against important, for everything still open
• 5 kinds of thing an answer turns out to be
• 0 project tool subscriptions spanning the group
• 1 place where what used to live only in my head now lives

The page itself is described in the artifact page.