Putting out fires in your business is fine, and there will always be some to put out. The trouble starts when it is all you do. The overload you feel comes from coping with no organizing next to it.

You work more and end up in the same place

Plenty of owners put in more hours than any employee they know, and still finish the year about where they began.

That is almost never a shortage of effort. The effort goes into fires and builds nothing, so whoever fights them all day reaches the evening as tired as someone who built something, with nothing to show for it.

The obvious answer is to work more. Once you look at your work as a flow, the answer is almost never more hours. To get to that point you first need to tell fire-fighting from organizing, and see why a business needs both.

You are allowed to cope

The booklet's word for fire-fighting is coping: putting out whatever is burning right now. It is necessary, and it is not enough on its own. The word comes from an Old French verb for striking a blow, which is what coping feels like: taking each blow as it comes.

The source opens with a permission. Coping is perfectly all right, and you always have to do it. In a small business it is half the job, and nobody asks you to stop. The request is that you organize things while you cope, so that coping is not the only thing going on.

Suppose an installer puts fires out for three years running. Every day gets dealt with, and no day ever gets easier.

Now suppose the same installer spends twenty minutes at the end of each day writing down whatever repeated. After a month he has four written procedures and three fewer fires a week. He keeps coping as before. He just stopped doing only that.

Where the overload comes from

Here the source names the cause without softening it. All the overload and overwhelm in an area comes from coping, and coping, and coping, with no organizing alongside.

The word to notice is entirely. It leaves no room for partly, or among other things. The feeling of drowning tells you there is no pattern, even when it seems to tell you how much work you have. The source even puts it as an equation. Saying you are absolutely drowning is, in its words, the same as saying:

“I can't organize worth a damn!”

Suppose a studio owner works forty hours a week and feels swamped, while a competitor two streets away works fifty-five and doesn't. The hours don't explain the difference.

Or suppose a garage owner takes on a second pair of hands to bring the load down. Two months later the load is back, because the number of people grew and the pattern stayed as it was.

Sometimes you really do need another pair of hands. Where there is no pattern, though, the extra pair brings confusion along with it, and no added capacity.

Channel the water or batter it

The source ties the two halves together with a flood. Water you can channel is water you can handle. Water you only fight off pulls you under.

Battering at water is real work, and it is exhausting. It does nothing, because it deals with the quantity of water and ignores its direction.

Take a consultant who works through sixty emails a day, one by one, first come first served. That is real work with no channel. Then he splits the inbox into three kinds and handles each kind in a fixed slot. The same sixty emails now take a third of the time.

The source states the two outcomes on two separate lines:

“The end product of cope is drown. The end product of organize is freedom.”

What the booklet does with this

In I Work Harder Than Anyone I Know, this chapter closes with two short exercises, one to identify and one to act. Both work on the fires of your own week.

The chapters after it show you how to look at your work as a flow, from the moment something comes in to the point where it leaves or gets stuck. The booklet gives you no large-company layout, because you have no large company and need none.

Nobody asks you to stop putting fires out. Keep doing it, and write down what repeats.