[GROW-15] Boring as snot, but useful as hell
Do you have things you do in your business (or for your blog) which are repetitive and you end up doing them over and over again?Of course you do. We all do.
Take preparing a blog post, for example. It is one thing to write it. It is another to get it all ready to be published. You got that feature image, the excerpt, adding a tweetable or two, categories, tags, yada yada yada.
Thing is…
This whole series has been about GROWTH. High-leverage things you can do to grow in the least possible time. Well, you’ll simply never be able to scale if you’re repeating the same mundane things over and over again…. doing it all yourself…. or even forgetting steps if you’re the one doing it.
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So, it pays to stop and document it. It is actually a really high-leverage use of your time!
I know, I know…. it’s boring as snot. And I agree with you. Nobody likes taking time to write a document on how to do something so mundane. If you think it is mundane, try writing it up some time. 😉
But, it is actually quite a good use of time. Here’s why…
- It makes that task doable by somebody else. Even if you don’t plan to outsource it, perhaps you will later. Either way, it makes that task portable. It means another could step in there and do it, just like you want them to.
- It means important steps won’t get left out. Things you do that you’ve found to be successful need to be baked into your processes, otherwise results can get inconsistent.
So, even if you’re the one doing that repetitive thing, stop and document it. Turn it into a process and checklist. Any time you do that task, yank out the ol’ checklist and go through it. If anything, it’ll ensure you don’t forget anything.
I encourage you to do this even in the early days. Even if you think hiring outside help is way off into the future. The very act of doing this helps you grow.
In the end, all business are basically a series of “systems”. It is one big system with a bunch of little sub-systems that make it up. Those systems are just little assembly lines… where certain steps are executed and some kind of output pops off the other end.
It’s real helpful to look at it that way, and part of that is to stop and document some of those obvious systems.
In my own business, here’s just a small sampling of a few of the processes I have documented inside of Google Drive (and many of which are now handled by people other than me)…
- Prepping a blog post to be published
- Prepping The Daily every day
- Posting archives of The Daily into the Lab
- Processing office hours calls (before and after)
- Distributing a blog post after it is published
You get the idea.
See ya tomorrow.
– David