Today’s deck is the Gothic Tarot.
It’s interesting, I do like the idea of single characters representing each card as a way to be minimalistic, but the ones used in this case are a tad limited when it comes to the imagery.
Today’s reading brings portents of being able to move ahead with new projects and stuff.
I did a lot of paperwork today in one go, which I’m very proud of, and also I cannot talk about it.
There wasn’t anything else going on today aside from making chicken salad again, so I actually wanna talk for a moment about contracts, for kicks.
I’ve had people ask me about how to make a contract in the past and there’s usually this… sense that you need a lawyer to even draft one. Bigger entities usually have a legal department that handle that sort of thing, yes, but it’s not a requirement.
A contract just needs three key sections: Deliniation of terminology, explanation of the responsabilities of all involved, and an exit clause.
The first is basically for legibility. It’s the part where it goes “X henceforth ‘Y’” for all the terms. It might be as simple as “this legal entity located in this specific address” and it might be as complex as “deliverables for this software whose copyright falls under the jurisdiction of this other party”.
With that you go to the next section where you explain shit like “the contractor is expected to deliver this sort of thing” and “the payment will be delivered after confirmation within so much time”. Again, it can be as simple as “Party A will pay Party B within 10 days from the deliverable being approved” or it can be as complex as indicating each step of the process.
Then you add a section explaining under which conditions the contract can be terminated.
Obviously it’s tricky to give specific examples since what the contract is for might change. It might be for one specific deliverable, it might be for a project, it might be as full time staff.
I felt like bringing this up today because I was working on some contract-related paperwork and I was remembering not just how daunting it felt for me years ago, but also remembering a few people asking me about it.
Oh yeah, two extra bits of advice for that.
The first is that you should really invest time (or money if needed) into a template contract. I cannot tell you how many times having a boilerplate template where I just shift names around has been a godsend.
And the other is that you should leave the exact payment amounts out of the contract. What I mean is that you should put articles specifying the payment schemes and whatnot, but indicate that the amount and such will be specified outside of the main document.
This is because money is such a volatile matter that having a separate agreement for the specific amounts will save everyone headaches.
Beyond all this, here’s the most important bit of information in this post:
I’m not a lawyer, I’m not providing sound legal advice, just anecdotal observations at best.