May 23

Systems

I’ve been stuck for a while now thinking that I need systems to make my business run more smoothly. I keep coming up against all the little issues. How can I make this talk to that? How can I coordinate all the pieces and remember to make them work? How can I automate it all and use technology and not be glued to my phone, all at the same time.

It struck me, though, as I was talking to a friend about how we do attendance at school. We’ve got a printed out checklist where we mark kids here or absent. At the bottom of each day’s tally, we write in the name of the program where we need to enter the information so it’s part of the larger system. When we’ve entered it? We put a check mark next to the program.

Easy to see what we need to do. Easy to tell if we’ve done it. Boom.

And I realized that systems don’t need to be complicated or technologically creative. They need to WORK. They need to be simple enough to do, and simple enough to tell if we’ve done them.

There’s a reason a checklist is a good system. You can see what you need to do, and you can see when you’ve done it.

My kind of system. A simple one.

Now can I stick to it?