It is easy to assume a busy owner's problem is how many roles he fills. According to the booklet, what wears him down are the roles that never got a name. He pays for them in time and irritation without knowing what he is paying for, and the remedy the source gives is much smaller than you would expect.
The role that wraps around your neck
The source offers a physical image for a feeling every overloaded owner knows. A person who fills several roles can go mad, it says, unless he knows his roles, because of “the unknown hat that comes up and wraps itself around his neck.” A hat, in the source's language, is a role.
The source also says what this role does. It bites, it wraps around the neck, it absorbs all of his time, and it is the one making him irritated.
Notice the wording. According to the booklet, the question that counts is which of your roles have never been called by name, and how many roles you fill matters less. A role with no name is one you pay for without seeing the bill.
In a small business these are usually small, everyday roles, like answering the phone, ordering materials, chasing payments and calming an angry customer.
What it looks like in a business
Suppose a garage owner who thought he was two things, a mechanic and an owner. In practice he also worked as the secretary, the debt collector, the buyer and the one who fixed the computers.
Or a designer whose biting role was explaining to clients why the work takes time. Nobody had ever called it a role, and it took her six hours a week.
Then there is the owner who cannot understand why he is exhausted after quiet days. When he looks closely, the quiet days are exactly the days when every unregistered role converged on him.
What the three have in common is that none of them knew what their time was going on. The tiredness was real, and its cause was invisible.
The remedy is smaller than it looks
The remedy the source gives is a list. Write down all the roles a person fills, without reorganising anything in the business. The source presents it as a trick for when you see someone collapsing under the load.
The source adds the detail that makes it work: let the person invent the name for each role. You do not need official titles. A name like the person who explains why the job is delayed is good enough.
The surprising point, according to the booklet, is that the act of writing it down brings relief before anything has changed. No role is cancelled and none is handed over. The invisible has simply become visible.
Suppose an owner who wrote down nineteen roles. She cancelled none of them that day, and she slept better that night.
Or an owner who gave one of his roles the name firefighter. Once the role had a name, he could ask how many hours a week it took.
And the case the other way round: the same owner hands two of the nineteen roles to an employee. Without the list that could not have happened, because there had been nothing defined to hand over.
The source describes an even smaller intervention, an in-tray and out-tray with the title of the post written on it. According to the source, that alone brings relief to someone who feels hard pressed. It admits that this sounds like very little, and that it works anyway.
Today that is a single folder, label or list that carries the name of a role. Work stops landing in someone's head and starts landing in a place.
Suppose an office that opens one shared mailbox for quotes, so that not everything lands with the owner. Within a week two other people know how to answer them.
The load follows the traffic
The chapter closes with a rule for how much help you need. According to the source, the load is “proportionate to the amount of traffic coming through the organization,” and has nothing to do with the size of the org board.
The rule works in both directions. A small business can be badly overloaded if a lot passes through it. You can also hold an impressive org board with no traffic at all. How much help you need depends on how much is flowing, and how big the business looks makes no difference.
It also means that when traffic rises, the load rises with it, at once, and does not wait for the end of the quarter.
Suppose a freelancer who got forty enquiries a month and managed fine. The next month brought ninety, and he was the same person with the same system.
Or an owner who tracked enquiries, quotes and jobs as well as revenue. She saw the overload a month before she felt it.
This chapter of the booklet has two exercises, one on the list and one on the tray. The next chapter turns to overwhelm, and what happens when work comes in and does not go out.
A role with no name costs you time without your knowing. Once it is written down, you can ask what it costs and who could take it over.