Weeknotes 008

This week I had a little think about money and opportunity cost, and I bought an obnoxious new cycling jacket.

This week felt the most normal since leaving regular employment so far. I worked fairly normal hours, I knew what I was working on and there were no major surprises. We’re working towards an eventual launch date of sorts, and we’re designing components, screens and words that move us towards the goal. For that reason this week’s notes might feel a bit different, less an account and more a little sidebar.

A couple of weeks ago I bought a laptop through the business, an M4 Pro Macbook pro. Not too interesting in itself, It arrived, it works, and is a huge enabler to getting work done. But it involved a bit of a head spinning moment. My relationship to money needs to change if I’m going to approach being a business owner properly. I need to learn to spend money as a business owner, not a consumer.

Case in point, I recently had to replace the TV. Ours broke back in June, and after deciding not to replace it until the clocks changed, giving us the novelty of a TV free summer, the evenings began to draw in and we decided to bite the bullet. Four weeks later, we had a TV. Four weeks because I like to spend money carefully. I’m not tight-fisted, but I like to know the options, look at the market, my needs, and weigh up the options, eventually spending money on the right thing.

All that prevaricating comes at a price though – opportunity cost, the cost of the things you can’t do as a consequence of another choice. Not such a big deal with a TV. Four extra weeks TV free is arguably a benefit in the long run; more books get read, board games played etc. But not so in a business, where indecision will directly impact the bottom line, and the cost of not spending money will quickly outweigh the cost of making a poor decision.

The laptop purchase very nearly turned into another four weeks or more of me weighing up the options. Should I buy refurbished, do I need a 14 or 16 inch screen? how much RAM? Would a Mac mini do the job? All this time I’m just about scraping by on an old intel Macbook that could hardly make an hour on a single battery charge, making me work more slowly, risking downtime through a hardware failure, and limiting me to working always within arms’ reach of a power outlet.

Luckily, I snapped out of it fairly quickly, but it was a wake up call. Had I dragged out a laptop purchase the costs would soon stack up, either directly through lost work, or implicitly, where undetectable, unmeasurable impacts begin to stack up and have negative effects.

l will always remember a bit Henry Rollins used to do in his spoken word shows about the tradesperson with the big roll of bank notes on a tool belt, along with everything else they need to get the job done. Money is another tool with which to get through the work. Good tools are needed for good work, good tools cost money, but not having the tools cost money too.

Finally, when I left TPXimpact they clubbed together and got me some Rapha vouchers, and I promised to buy the most obnoxious cycling garment I could find. Well it arrived this week. It’s definitely obnoxious but it’s also comfy and keeping me lovely and dry. Funny how its so easy to spend someone else’s money isn’t it?

Smug man in a smug pink cycling jacket

Listening

Rolo Tomassi’s live at The Electric Ballroom arguably sounds better than their studio albums

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQtXVkRWjGw

Watching

We finally sat down and watch Deadpool and Wolverine. It had its moments but lacked the punchiness of the first two, and the ending was baffling.