When you work alone, a structure sounds like something for companies. The source says the opposite: a smaller business needs its structure more, and the smallest businesses are the least likely to have one.
Even one person needs a sort of org board
The source says it outright, with no qualification attached. Even if an organization has only one person in it, that person would still need some idea of organization and a sort of org board.
Notice the words a sort of. They stand for a working picture of who does which job, including when every job is yours. A formal chart is no part of it. A large company's layout would not help you here, because you have no large company and you do not need one.
A business of one still has several roles. Someone sells, someone does the work, someone keeps the paperwork. In the source's words:
“The smaller the number of people in an activity, the more hats each has.”
Suppose a freelance designer flips twenty times a day between pitching clients, producing the work and keeping the books. The workload is ordinary, and the tiredness triples.
Now suppose she fixes it. Mornings go to the work itself, afternoons to winning clients, and Thursdays to the paperwork. She keeps all three roles and loses the jumping.
The oddity
Here is the inversion that is hard to accept. The source says an individual or a small group needs a very precise org board to get anywhere. Then comes the oddity: the smaller the group, the more it needs one, and individuals and small groups are still the ones least likely to have it.
The reason is simple. In a large company, a person who skips a step damages only that step. When you work alone, every step is yours, so a single skip drops the whole sequence, and no one is around to watch it happen.
Suppose a consultant skips the written proposal because the two of them already talked it through. Three of his projects end in an argument about scope. Or a designer skips sign-off on the sketch, and every project of hers carries two unnecessary rounds of revision.
At the moment of the skip it looks like a shortcut. The price arrives later, in the argument over scope or in the revision nobody needed.
So the sentence I'm too small for procedures has it backwards. In a business this small, you cannot do without them.
Seven baskets
The source gives a case that is hard to forget. A woman was holding down seven branches of an office, and everything was tangled. What untangled it was seven baskets, one for each branch, and a stated time each day for working on each one. She sorted what came in by branch and then worked through the baskets in rotation. In the source's words:
“She suddenly got production where she had had just despair and chaos.”
In the booklet's terms, the baskets are channels and the rotation is the sequence. Those are the two actions the booklet defines as organizational genius: arrange the order of actions, and designate a channel for each type of thing that flows.
It is worth noticing what the solution left out. It had no extra employee, no software and no extra hours. It had seven baskets and a stated time.
Suppose a freelancer sets up seven folders on her computer, one per kind of work, and gives each a fixed half hour every day. It is the same idea again. Or an owner keeps four physical trays on the desk and sees at a glance where the pile is building.
What this means when you work alone
If you work alone and feel the work pulling you in every direction, the cause is almost never a lack of effort. The smaller the business, the more the pattern matters, and the more each skipped step costs.
The natural reaction to overload is to look for another pair of hands, or to work longer. Sometimes that is right. Where there is no pattern, though, the extra pair of hands adds confusion, and the extra hours go into putting out fires. The woman with the seven baskets added neither, and she got production.
In I Work Harder Than Anyone I Know, this chapter closes with two short exercises, one to count and one to act. Both are about the roles you already fill.
A structure for a small business can start with seven baskets on a desk.