What I Wish I'd Had From the Start

Somewhere in the early years of running Pooil Vaaish Engraving, I developed a system. Not because I'm naturally organised — I'm not, particularly — but because the alternative was losing my mind.

Custom work generates information differently to other kinds of business. Nothing repeats. Every client is different, every job is different, every timeline is different. And every piece of information about every job arrives from a different direction — a phone call, an email, a conversation at a market, a DM at eleven o'clock at night.

In the early days I managed it the way most people manage it. Lists. Notebooks I couldn't find. Emails I meant to reply to. Details I was sure I'd written down somewhere. The low-level background anxiety of not quite knowing whether I'd forgotten something important.

I hadn't developed a system. I'd developed a coping mechanism. And coping mechanisms are exhausting.

It took years to get there, and longer to understand why it worked. The answer is simple: information that has a fixed home doesn't require any decision-making. You don't have to think about where it goes. You don't have to remember which notebook is current, or whether you filed that receipt, or where you wrote down what the client asked for. It goes in its place. It stays there. You can find it.

Three places. That's all it took. A bound enquiry book. A lever arch file. A dedicated email address. And a simple spreadsheet that makes everything in those three places searchable in under a minute.

I wish I'd had it from the first year instead of the fifteenth. Not because the years in between were a disaster — they weren't — but because the mental load of carrying everything in my head was so normal to me that I didn't realise how heavy it was until I put it down.

Rosie