What I Do
A question that I enjoy answering is “so, what do you do?” The answer is usually not what people expect.
I have the pleasure of running a small business that sends prayer letters for missionaries around the world.
In most missionary organizations, each staff person is responsible for bringing together a team of people who will pray for them, support them financially, or both. To keep them informed about what’s happening, missionaries send these supporters updates every so often (ideally monthly or bimonthly, though some also send quarterly). These updates are called prayer letters, because they usually include prayer requests.
A prayer letter service is a company that takes the letters that are written by the missionaries and sends them to their supporters. Rather than making the missionaries and their families do all the work of printing, folding, stuffing, sealing, and stamping the letters, these companies do the work for them. This lets them get their letters out more easily — there’s a great tendency to procrastinate sending letters when there’s a lot of manual work involved — and lets them focus more of their time on their mission field, rather than on administrative work.
One advantage that a prayer letter service has over individuals stuffing letters themselves is that they can invest in certain types of technology that automates some of the work. For instance, there are machines that will fold, stuff, and seal letters; that stamp envelopes; and that print envelopes much more quickly than a regular inkjet printer.
In my company’s case, nearly everything that can be automated is automated, which allows me to serve hundreds of missionaries with a very small staff — currently one person full-time, and one part-time. This helps keep costs down for missionaries, as long as the cost of the automation doesn’t outweigh the cost of employees.
What Can Be Automated?
This is a question that I’m constantly asking myself, and, outside of printing and mailing letters, this is the focus of most of my time.
Because I have a background in programming and scripting, with a focus on usability, I’ve been able to write a lot of software that reduces the amount of work needed on both the missionary’s side and my side. And, since I’m very intimately involved in the day-to-day process of sending letters, it’s easy to find repetitive tasks that can be simplified or removed altogether.
As a result, I’m frequently adding snippets of code to the software that will shave off 10 seconds here, and 30 seconds there. Spending an hour to save 10 seconds isn’t a good investment for a one-time task, but when that task is being done a dozen times or more per day, it pays for itself quickly.
A Day in the Life…
I haven’t really decided on a regular regimen for work, but it usually falls roughly into the following time slots:
First Thing: Look at E-Mail, the size of the work queue, and get a feel for how the day is going to look. Answer quick E-Mails, read and delete status E-Mails.
Morning: Usually some sort of administrative task or programming project. This is the most nebulous part of the day, and can include any of the following:
- entering purchases into QuickBooks
- processing payments (always a happy time)
- writing E-Mails that need more in-depth answers
- planning future equipment purchases and interacting with sales folks,
- getting service done on current equipment
- adding time-shaving features to the operator side of the software
- thinking
Early Afternoon: Somewhere around lunch time, I start processing current letters. If there are a lot of them, I’ll start a little earlier. If there’s a lot of administrative stuff piling up, I’ll start a little later. Occasionally, I have administrative-only or programming-only days, when I don’t do letters at all — usually only when I can do so while still meeting my stated turnaround goals (three business days, preferably two). On the flip side, when there are a lot of mailings in the queue, I’ll skip the morning routine altogether and jump right into processing letters.
The first part of processing letters involves proofreading them, putting previews online for the missionaries to review and approve, and sending them to a printer. I generally spend a good bit of this time answering letter-related E-Mails as well, and occasionally having back-and-forth conversations with missionaries by E-Mail.
If there are any bulk mailings waiting to be mailed, I’ll usually drop them off at the post office a little before 3:00, which is the latest time they can be delivered and still be processed the same day.
Late Afternoon: Somewhere around 3:00, I stop preparing letters for printing, and start printing envelopes and getting everything stuffed. This is the transition from when I spend most of my time at the computer to when I spend most of my time going back and forth between the various machines.
If the early part of the afternoon has gone well, I’ll have a stack of letters sitting on the printers, and a separate work list at the computer that’s dedicated to envelope printing (my college laptop, which in its retirement days is happy to be less mobile and spend its afternoons pulling mailing lists and feeding them to envelope printers).
This is a really bad time to call me, mostly because I’m usually running somewhere between three and five machines simultaneously, several of which produce a lot of noise, and all of which need regular supervision. So, I’m very likely to ignore the phone and E-Mail during this time.
On days when Christine is working with me, I’ll usually continue on the early afternoon schedule all afternoon, and she’ll do all of the late afternoon tasks as soon as letters are waiting on the printer.
5:00: My post office is open until 5:30, so at 5:00, or slightly thereafter, everything that’s finished gets moved to the car, and brought to the post office. I try to deliver letters in person whenever possible, for a few reasons:
- if the weather is adverse, there’s no risk of the letters getting wet when they’re moved from an outside dropbox to the post office.
- I frequently have enough mail to fill up the dropboxes in any case, and like to avoid going to the loading dock to drop things off there.
- the post office recycles my envelope boxes, so I don’t have to collapse and store them until my recycling gets picked up.
Evening: On evenings when I work, it’ll usually be to finish mailings that I didn’t get done by 5:30. I’m able to drop mail off as late as 8:00 and still have it processed the same day, since I’m next to an area distribution center (i.e. a post office that handles all of the mail in the region — handy).
I’ll also do more programming projects in the evenings, and answer more E-Mail (you may have noticed that I spend quite a bit of time writing and responding to E-Mails). Writing projects (my own “monthly” newsletters and web site updates) usually happen during the evening as well.
And the process repeats itself each weekday.
On Saturdays, I’ll occasionally work for a few hours to clear out any backlog from the week. Increasingly, though, this hasn’t been needed. Otherwise, I’ll usually focus on a couple of hours of clean-up around the office, or other little administrative chores.
I don’t work on Sundays, except for the occasional quick E-Mail. This is for personal religious reasons (we may not need to keep the Sabbath to satisfy the Law, but it’s still a good idea to spend a day focusing on God alone, at least as much as we’re able, and Sunday is often the best day to do this), practical reasons (avoiding overwork), and cultural reasons (some people who may be my customers feel very strongly that it’s wrong to work on Sunday, so in order not to cause offense or stumbling, I accommodate).
And that’s more or less what I do.
