Creating Systems for Success
Most of us run our lives on a handful of systems. Between our cell phones, our daily planners and our e-mail inboxes, we organize ourselves and our time. Systems reduce the time it takes to accomplish a task, minimize the effort required, and increase the ease with which we can accomplish our goals. Given such benefits, it is advisable to periodically examine your work and your personal life for opportunities to add systems.
Systems are simply ways of automating or structuring processes so that they can occur without much thought or attention. Systems allow the task to be done by more than just one person, so that the required activity will get done even if you take a vacation or, for whatever reason, are unable or unwilling to do it yourself.
Figuring Out What to Systematize
For most of us, there are dozens of similar repetitive tasks, large and small, in our businesses, our jobs and our personal lives that could be systematized. To identify where you can apply systems, step back from your activities and try to look at the big picture objectively. Ask yourself the following questions:
Where are your frustrations? This is an important test for two reasons. First, you are more likely to be frustrated if you are redoing tasks that bring no particular satisfaction. Second, you are going to be frustrated if you have to relearn a task or “recreate the wheel” every time a specific need comes up.
What is limiting your business and personal success? What are the choke points? What activities – if you did more of them or did them more often – would lead to increased business and personal success? By strategically focusing in this way, you are more likely to spot high-value opportunities for systemization.
What causes you stress? If you are responsible for doing certain activities that you find overly difficult, unpleasant, demeaning, or painful, they could be causing you a significant amount of stress. Even if you know the steps by heart, systematizing at least part of these stress-inducing activities could yield big benefits to you and your well-being.
Start by Writing It Down
The first step in systematizing a process is to write it down. What exactly is the process you go through to complete the task? If you’re struggling to get all the steps down, try the “backwards” approach. Start with the end result and then determine what you did right before that, and so on, for each step. To make this even easier, record the steps required to complete a task as you’re doing them.
Another valuable exercise is to document what everyone in your organization or home does. Forget job descriptions: You want to know what they actually do. This may highlight high-value opportunities to build systems that can be leveraged throughout the organization or by all members of the family.
Often, the documentation you create in this process is all the system you require. The next time the task comes up, you can pull out the file and save the relearning. It also becomes the core of a training manual for new employees or family members who are growing into new responsibilities. Imagine referring your teenager to the step-by-step instructions of how to wash a load of laundry next time they get home from day one of a two-day soccer tournament.
Do the Cost-Benefit Math
Here are some guidelines for figuring out which of the myriad choices are worth the effort of creating a system:
What are the odds you will be doing this again? How often? Both tasks that need to be done frequently and tasks that are done only once in a while are good candidates for a system. Automating the frequent tasks can save you time daily or weekly while systematizing the infrequent tasks will avoid the need for relearning the process and reduce the risk of mistakes.
How hard is it to automate? Creating paper checklists is easy; programming Outlook to sync your phone contacts and automatically generate follow up emails isn’t so easy. However, don’t give up if one approach is too expensive or complicated. Just look for a simpler system.
How critical is the task? And how critical is failing to execute it well? High-value tasks (such as annual trade-shows) and tasks with a high cost of not doing them (like missing a bill payment) are good candidates for setting up systems in order to ensure the benefits of doing them well and reduce the risks of leaving them undone.
Can you hire it out? In some cases, the best system is to hand the documentation for the process to a junior employee or an external service provider. In particular, those stress-inducing tasks you noted above can be partially off-loaded. But you will need to do the work up front of carefully recording the steps involved, and how to achieve and measure the necessary outcomes.
Get Out of the Box
As you go through this analysis, don’t be afraid to start with the question: Why do we do this process in the first place? For every process you find that could be automated with a new system, you may find another that can be eliminated altogether. Systematically reviewing your business and home activities this way may be the most valuable system of all.
I invite you to share your perspective on this article. What new systems have you added to your work and personal life? To join the discussion, simply leave a comment.
