I’ve been thinking a lot about systems lately, and how I can create them in a way that takes the “me” out of the equation in my business. Part of this is because I’ve been meaning to re-read The E-Myth, and the other part is an increasing awareness that I have so few hours in any given day (24? Is that all?)
It’s a funny twist: the adjectives applied to you that make you a success in building a business are the exact opposite of the ones that you seek out in an employment situation: redundant, dispensable, replaceable. If you have a job, and this is where you ended up, you’re due to get fired. If you have a business, it’s time for an amazing vacation.
So systems. The more reproducible processes you can create, and by that I mean reproducible by someone else, consistently, with the same outcome, the less you have to do. At first, you’ll be the implementor, but these are the things you delegate and monitor over time (and as I think I mentioned earlier, the monitoring is systemizable and delegatable, spellcheck forgive me.)
I keep a log of everything I do in a day, so I’ve developed my new post-game ritual, which is a series of questions:
- How much of the day’s activities are likely to happen again?
- How much of the day’s activities required my personal unique skill set?
- For the things that had to be done by me, could that be changed?
- And more importantly, were they even necessary?
I end up with a grouping of the day’s schedule, but with a particular focus, and it’s one that, I hope, will identify trends over time. I hired my first designer after a similar exercise earlier in the year when I realized I was spending 10 hours a week in Photoshop, which is an application I have no business using, frankly. In that case, it was the replacement of a technical skill with a skilled person.
With this new ritual, I’m looking to replace processes with people.
Photo by BinaryApe
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