Acronym

As the publisher of essentially a one-man magazine, StoneDimensions, I face of myriad of issues on a day to day basis. Add to this, the fact that prior to the conception of this project, I had never worked a day of my life in publications; and you start to get the picture that publishing this magazine has been an extraordinary learning experience for me.

Sitting at my desk this morning to begin processing orders (we sell this magazine in bulk to our members for distribution to their customers and design partners) for volume 2 issue 1, I was really hoping to develop a more efficient process for entering orders, running credit cards, emailing receipts, etc. It was time to streamline this process, but I kept returning to the comfortable method I had fallen into more than a year ago.

I decided that I was going to do something I had rarely done before…ask for help. I figured that asking someone to critique a process that I developed would be a terrifying experience…and it was. However, after about 10 minutes my boss stopped me and we reviewed everything that went into entering an order by putting it on a whiteboard. There were several steps that could easily be consolidated and several more which could be eliminated all together. AWESOME!

It is now 4:06, and those 100 orders for 20,000 or so magazines have been processed in literally half the time that it took me to enter the orders for any of the previous 3 issues. Swallowing my pride and realizing that two heads were better than one saved me at least one day of mindless order processing. I learned a life lesson today.