Most of our work is encased in processes.
Step 1. Start like this
Step 2. Do your creative/unique/custom thing
Step 3. finish like this.
The procedural steps where order matters or where things get complex are the ideal places to optimize and offload.
Since being diagnosed with MS, I’ve become acutely sensitive to my energy levels. Energy management has become my main focus in designing better systems for how I work.
My biggest mistakes have been the times when I’ve acted like I am the process, rather than creating the process.
Process Making
If you’ve been the go-to person at work for something, you start to be naturally molded into the process. However, this is a mistake both for you and the business, because you may not always be available or perhaps will not stay at the company at some point.
Businesses lose lots of momentum with the loss of long-term employees, because they take their knowledge with them.
Wherever applicable, I recommend developing SOPs for your work—this becomes a way for you to offload some of the lift and also is a gift you can give to your company when you leave.
An SOP is a “Standard Operating Procedure,” and it’s basically a checklist or outline of some business process. Whether you’ve had one given to you, or you’ve internalized one for the task at hand, you are using SOPs in your work all the time.
If you’re a developer, do you use git to push code changes to a certain repo? Do you do a QA check at some point? Are there certain things that have to be done before your changes go live? That’s probably an SOP.
If you’re a designer, do you choose a canvas size for a new graphic? Do you export your images with certain settings for a specific place? Do you always start with wireframes and have check-ins before creating the hi-res mock-up? Those are SOPs.
If you’re a marketer, do you create reports for the end of the month? Do you prepare requests for website work by gathering images and content and then submitting a proposal? Those are SOPs.
It’s how the work gets done—and usually it’s how the work gets done specifically at your company, because workflows often vary from team to team, at least in the details.
Don’t Be an SOP
Here’s where we have a major productivity boosting potential: creating the SOPs, rather than internalizing them.
You have a limited capacity for decision making, task switching, and memory. There are constraints we face as humans day-to-day, and especially if you have other impacting factors with health, disability, or any number of things.
The intuitive way you do things is not always the most effective. That’s the problem with defaulting to the internalized SOP—it’s hard to examine, it only surfaces when you’re doing those tasks, and you’re forced to make lots of tiny decisions about how to accomplish the task over and over again.
Let’s revisit the process and find spots to develop our SOP.
Create the SOP
Write it out
First, we’re going to write out that intuitive process—start with a simple task first.
Write down each step you take as you take it.
Examine your process
Now we have our SOP base and we can look for ways to optimize.
You could create templates or write down notes on how to create something consistently (code snippets, design files, spreadsheets with formulas).
There may be ways to prepare information in a better way before the process. Maybe there’s a shortcut, or something that can be removed entirely.
Optimize and Update
Now that you’ve seen your process, take control and make it better.
Test it out—next time you perform this task, follow your SOP instead of doing it intuitively. The idea is that someone else should get the same result by following the guide you’ve created.
If you forgot something or parts of it seem clunky, revise it.
Make it findable
Put that SOP somewhere you’ll find it again and pull it out every time you need to do that task. Now you can zoom through it.
If your company provides a wiki or some other knowledge base, put it where others can find it.
When to SOP
Obviously, you don’t have to create an SOP for literally every task that you do at work. Some tasks really are too simple and are intuitive enough after getting familiar with the process.
I tend to create SOPs when a task is:
- infrequent, but high-stakes
- tedious or complex
- and / or takes too much energy to remember specifics or details
Here’s an example I recently did for my home insurance that checks all of those boxes.
Due to some silly (and highly inefficient) rules with my mortgage and my HOA, I have to send proof of insurance that my HOA provides over to my mortgage company every year.
The first couple of years I would get a threatening letter reminding me I needed to do this, and I would have to dig through a bunch of papers to find the insurance carrier contact info.
After the first year, I had to find the previous year’s email to the insurance since it had the details of what information the carrier would need from me.
Then I would wait for the email back with a PDF that I then had to upload to my mortgage company’s website on some random page that, again, I had to look up.
This is the perfect task for an SOP, even though it’s not work-related. It has to be done every year. There’s no way I’m going to remember everything, especially the contact and request info that I have to send.
This is how I solved it:
Each year, I have an email automatically send to my insurance carrier, pre-populated with the information I need to send.
Instead of a threatening letter in my real mailbox alerting me it’s time to do this, I see an email reply from my insurance company. That’s my trigger to go look up this SOP in Obsidian, my favorite tool for knowledge management.
Then I download the PDF, click on the link in my notes, auto-fill the form and upload the PDF.
The last step is to create next year’s email and schedule it to send in one year and I’m done.
Cyborg
I went from a stressed out, week long process to a 10 minute process that accomplished everything I needed ahead of schedule.
Ultimately, you have the opportunity in most things to control your process. Wherever you have that control, try and refine the process. Write it out. Test it. Automate parts of it—or the entire thing.
You are human, after all, and that means you have unique creative, strategic, and visionary capabilities.
Don’t divert the energy that could go towards those capabilities. Let the easily repeatable, tedious, or administrative tasks be done by a computer or by a streamlined, easy-to-follow SOP that you’ve created and refined.