@hobbyhub makes a great point, and it’s an idea I used well a few years ago for a micro company (we called it a pocket-money sideline) three of us ran for a while. Every incoming email went into a group inbox. It didn’t matter if it was addressed to me, Nick or Scott, it all went into one generic inbox, that everyone had access to.

Under this, we created a folder structure where we put our names, and then a few “status” subfolders (such as “in progress” and “done”). Anything in the inbox was considered “pending”. As each of us read the inbox, we’d move emails into different folders to claim ownership of the task that needed doing. Anything could be claimed by anyone, until it went into the “done” folder (by arrangement we would even take tasks out of each other’s named folders, so someone else could deal with an issue if one of us was getting too bogged down). There were no hard-and-fast rules, just a few people able to see what each other had lined up, and see what needed allocating.

Sure, you can use fancy organisational tools, like Trello or Airtable or Slack or whatever, but it doesn’t need to be complicated; we were doing our email system years ago, and it worked really well. I’m pretty sure you can get Tweets directed @ you sent as emails (if there isn’t an off-the-shelf solution, I reckon I could throw something together to integrate with their API to do it). I know you can get Facebook messages turned into emails (I had to deactivate it on my account after being swamped with emails!). So that’s Twitter/Facebook reduced to email. Instagram probably has a similar functionality?

Once you’re dealing with emails, not trawling looking across the internet for places that people might have left a message for you, you can do it just a few times a day (or, if you’re using the shared inbox idea, leave it long enough and someone else will pick it up!).

Try to imagine how it’ll be in a few years, when the company is “running itself” – enough people dealing with enough tasks that nobody has to work 24/7 to keep on top of things. Think about how it’ll be when you can come into work and spend a few hours on admin, a few hours producing content, and a few hours generally hanging out with some cool guys and having a bit of fun. And how you’ll get to go home to your family, and spend time on your own hobbies and interests outside of work. Imagine how the company would need to be structured to enable it.

And get those procedures in place NOW so it actually happens as quickly as possible!