💌 Time Well Spent: Hop Down a Rabbit Hole with this 1969 Manager Manual 🕳️🐇
+ Free two-week trial access to Rolling in D🤦🏻♀️h — link expires 10/21
Hi Friends,
I am a business operations voyeur; I love inside peeks at how companies are run. So you can imagine my delight at encountering The Playboy Club’s Bunny Manual, thanks to the Internet Archive—more on this in the Tools section below, despite my side eye at the institution itself. Hat tip to Caitlin Dewey for surfacing it! Check out her Substack, Links I Would Gchat You If We Were Friends.
Reminder from last week: in honor of rounding the corner into a new decade earlier this week, I’m giving you a gift! A 14-day free trial to Rolling in D🤦🏻♀️h with Jenny Blake: Divine disaster diaries from a breadwinning business owner living in New York City.
Because this is a paid project, most of the essays are behind a paywall—this link will enable you to read the 30+ essays in the archives. You’ll also get twice-weekly posts for the next two weeks. Check out these recent posts:
🎁 Get two free weeks of ‘doh at this link » (Good through 10/21/23)
Now onto this week’s round-up! + Plus extra goodies over the paywall rainbow at the end . . .
⚙️ Tips & Tools
Based on the 27-page Bunny Manual, we can glean a few things:
Don’t take your Manager Manual too seriously—Why not sprinkle some fun graphics and perfectly matched animated gifs throughout?
Introduce your Delightfully Tiny Team: Who does what on the core team? When a new person has a question, who should they ask? Is there a software help center to search first?
Write an introduction letter: Share your values, and emphasize what’s in it for team members in their careers more broadly, connecting their roles to the larger context of what you are offering the world. Here are the opening lines from the Bunny Manual (LOL at “man-sized drinks”):
“Welcome to the world of Playboy! You can take great pride in being selected as a Bunny; it’s a job that you will find is both unique and exciting. The Playboy Bunny has created a new definition and standard for charm, beauty and friendly service. Playboy Clubs are world-famous for their distinctive decor, unique facilities, good food, man-sized drinks and, particularly, their beautiful Bunnies.”
⚒️ Related Free Time Toolkit resource: Manager Manual Entry Template, done-for-you Free Time Operations Dashboard
Here’s a snapshot of my Manager Manual—a board view in a Notion database:
🎉 Featured
I had a great time chatting with Steve McCready for his show, Paradoxical:
📆 Upcoming Events
🎙 Podcasters: Don’t miss this year’s Podcasting for Business Conference by One Stone Creative, the production wizards behind Free Time and Pivot.
I’ll be delivering a session on Private Podcast Feeds: 3 Creative Ways to Enhance Your Business and Serve Your Community on Nov. 15 at 10:30am ET.
Free Timers (that’s you!) can get 15% off registration with promo code JBE15. Or upgrade to an annual subscription here and you’ll get a promo code to enroll for free ($197 value) in the footer of today’s email.
Paid subscribers and BFFs: You are invited to attend at no cost as my VIP guests! Scroll down below my signature for instructions on getting your comped pass.
💬 Quote
Check out this exquisite description, from a New York Times Book Review profile on “bohemian icon” Kiki Man Ray, More Than a Muse, based on Mark Braude’s book Kiki Man Ray: Art, Love, and Rivalry in 1920s Paris (emphasis mine):
“We open just as Kiki de Montparnasse begins to sing. It’s a scene narrated in the present tense, stitched together from a patchwork of memories — for who didn’t leave a record of their time in 1920s Paris? Especially if they’d managed to elbow their way into the Jockey, with its sticky floors, graffitied walls and stiff cocktails, where Kiki — queen of the neighborhood — purred her nostalgic songs.
If you could smell it, said one contemporary, her voice would be “garlic hitting a pan’s hot butter and wine”: pungent, irresistible and impossible to recapture once it’s gone.
—Joanna Scutts, More Than a Muse
💭 Question
How can you punch up your next piece of writing by employing metaphor and/or the five senses?
For help with that, check out Sudowrite, an AI writing tool that offers descriptive suggestions for improving a single sentence by providing options based on each of the five senses. I don’t use it because I am trying to stretch myself to come up with language based on my actual experience and observations, but I probably would be if I were writing fiction!
📝 Permission
To write and speak with a flourish :) 👨🏻🎨
🎙 Recent Episodes
Free Time:
232: 11 Practices That Help Me Strengthen My Business Intuition (Part One)
231: Building and Selling a Profitable Content-Based Business with David Thomas Tao
230: What’s your ratio of quantity to quality for ongoing creative work?
229: How (and When) to Trust Yourself and Others with Ilise Benun
Subscribe wherever you listen here »
Pivot:
343: 🥳 Five Questions and Attempted Answers for My 40th Birthday
342: “Whatever Comes Through Me Comes for Me First,” with Nicole Antoinette
341: Pivoting from Prestigious Consulting Jobs to the Pathless Path with Paul Millerd
Subscribe wherever you listen here »
Thank you for being here reading and listening!
❤️ With Gratitude,
P.S. Extra Goodies Over the Paywall Rainbow 🌈💰
🔐 Thank you to our generous paying subscribers who help sustain Time Well Spent! Upgrade to unlock this week’s make-you-smile memes as a token of my gratitude ☺️
