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Ask HN: One-person companies—how do you manage it all and stay sane?

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Re: Ask HN: One-person companies—how do you manage it all and stay sane?

#2
For the finance and managing contractors, I use Kimai [0]. It can track your time, manage your customers, projects, your team, expenses and even generate your invoices. I only use it for tracking time, managing customers and projects and generating invoices.

My full finances are stored in Notion 1, this is because I can access that anywhere, and I can use the built-in table functions to calculate my VAT and tax. When I started, I also used Notion as a CRM that I logged customer/prospect interactions with, but that faded out after a while.

[0]: https://www.kimai.org/

[1]: https://www.notion.so/

Re: Ask HN: One-person companies—how do you manage it all and stay sane?

#3
Even in a one-person company you don't have to do everything alone. You can offload certain things to other people. For example, you can get an accountant to do the finance stuff for you. There might also be tools that you can buy or rent that take away some of the load. There are lots of tools for building websites and payment solutions for example. I am sure there are planning tools as well. And once you have outsourced as much as you can, if you still cannot manage the load, that might be a signal that you need to really grow your company and to hire people, although there is also the possibility to subcontract part of your work if you do not want to commit to that.

Re: Ask HN: One-person companies—how do you manage it all and stay sane?

#4
Sanity is overrated. When I am overwhelmed I cope best when I manage to work on the things that feel most important at the moment. It causes the least cognitive dissonance. Now, the difficult part is to make the things that feel most important roughly congruent with the things that are actually important- that's the art. The good news is that it doesn't have to perfect.

Re: Ask HN: One-person companies—how do you manage it all and stay sane?

#5
I have noticed a lot of solopreneurs take proud in doing everything themselves and do not want to hire and expand. Yes, I get it. I once had a lot of employees and it is stressfull with too much responsibility and issues.

But, you can have 1 or 2 people. or 5. You don't need to have 10 people, or 100 or 1000.

With 1 person you can get 150% more done if you structure it well. Why? That one person can specialize. If you wanna talk about this just find me on my blog :)

Re: Ask HN: One-person companies—how do you manage it all and stay sane?

#6
post #2

For the finance and managing contractors, I use Kimai [0]. It can track your time, manage your customers, projects, your team, expenses and even generate your invoices. I only use it for tracking time, managing customers and projects and generating invoices. My full finances are stored in Notion 1, this is because I can access that anywhere, and I can use the built-in table functions to calculate my VAT and tax. When…

What kind of finance features does notion have ? It would be interesting to hear how notion can be used for finance ?

Re: Ask HN: One-person companies—how do you manage it all and stay sane?

#7
post #2

For the finance and managing contractors, I use Kimai [0]. It can track your time, manage your customers, projects, your team, expenses and even generate your invoices. I only use it for tracking time, managing customers and projects and generating invoices. My full finances are stored in Notion 1, this is because I can access that anywhere, and I can use the built-in table functions to calculate my VAT and tax. When…

What kind of finance features does notion have ? It would be interesting to hear how notion can be used for finance ?

I'd assume it has "Excel features", which translate to finance features.

Re: Ask HN: One-person companies—how do you manage it all and stay sane?

#8
post #2

For the finance and managing contractors, I use Kimai [0]. It can track your time, manage your customers, projects, your team, expenses and even generate your invoices. I only use it for tracking time, managing customers and projects and generating invoices. My full finances are stored in Notion 1, this is because I can access that anywhere, and I can use the built-in table functions to calculate my VAT and tax. When…

What kind of finance features does notion have ? It would be interesting to hear how notion can be used for finance ?

As kreetx said, I use the Excel-like features.

For example; the finances for each company should be submitted to the national tax department each quarter. I configured the Notion tables to group them by quarter of the year. For each of these quarters, it will automatically configure the income, outgoing and the result.

Re: Ask HN: One-person companies—how do you manage it all and stay sane?

#9
If you're struggling to the extent that you're questioning your sanity, you're trying to do too much. There's a limit to what a single person can do.

If you want to stay a one-person company and keep your sanity, do less. Otherwise, figure out how to hire employees. But in this case, it's going to be a long journey still.

Re: Ask HN: One-person companies—how do you manage it all and stay sane?

#10

Sanity is overrated. When I am overwhelmed I cope best when I manage to work on the things that feel most important at the moment. It causes the least cognitive dissonance. Now, the difficult part is to make the things that feel most important roughly congruent with the things that are actually important- that's the art. The good news is that it doesn't have to perfect.

One of the nice things about this vs being employed by someone else, is often the thing that feels the most important probably is!
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