3 Simple Systems to Live Life By Design, Not By Default
How many times have you thought “I wish my business could run on autopilot”? While it is a good idea to automate some areas of your business, running your life on autopilot is a terrible idea. If you have set goals in your life, big or small, you need to design your morning, your day, your week, your month, your year, and your life.
Waking up in the morning and immediately checking your email or scrolling through Facebook and Instagram is not moving the needle forward. If you have goals for yourself, you need to decide specific activities to take each day to reach those goals. Many times knowing those specific activities is not enough and we must find ways to build systems and habits to support those activities. Geoff Woods from The 1 Thing shares this quote all the time. #truth
“People do not decide their futures, they decide their habits and their habits decide their futures.”
― F. M. Alexander
I like to look at habits and systems as synonymous. Habits are usually looked at from a personal perspective and systems is a term more frequently used in business. At the end of the day systems are the habits of your business. Knowing what systems you build into your business will ultimately decide your success or failure.
You may get to a certain point of success through raw talent and “hustle” but if you really want to scale your business or give yourself more time to enjoy your success, you will have to decide which systems and habits you need to bake into your business and personal life.
I believe in systems so much that my business partner and I have adjusted our business to make Business Optimization our primary service. We have looked at all of our current and past clients and found that digital marketing isn’t necessarily what people need most. What they need most is a stronger collaboration environment married with simple and optimized workflows to grow and scale their business.
TL;DR
Below are 3 of the most basic systems you can start designing for yourself and your business. You don’t need an app or technical knowledge to apply these. Just a little bit of time and clarity. The easy part is designing them. The hard part is implementing these systems to the point they become a habit.
1. Design Your Morning
Are you willing to give yourself 1 hour each day without any distractions? No social media, no emails, no nonsense. What does your perfect morning look like and what are the top 2 activities that if you did them each and every day would get you 1 step closer to your big goals and help you win the day? Write them down on a piece of paper and post it somewhere you will see it everyday.
2. Plan Your Meetings
Do you just book meetings or just show up not knowing what the meeting is actually about? Does every meeting you attend have an agenda and all items prioritized for discussion? Value other people’s time and put effort into each meeting you attend. If you don’t have an agenda you’ll need to create one or ask for one if you were invited to the meeting.
3. Get Clear On How Your Team Communicates
Is everyone on your team very clear on how to communicate with each other? When to use email, Slack, or text message? Being clear on how the team communicates will eliminate a lot of problems before they happen. For instance, an urgent message wouldn’t be sent through email but maybe via text or Slack. Also, you wouldn’t give a task with 10 line items through text unless you want to confuse them and make it hard to clearly understand the requirements. Create a list of all the channels your team uses to communicate and decide the best use for each channel. Once you have created this list, share it with the team and finalize it together.
My goal is to be able to help you learn and implement simple systems that can help you achieve your goals and scale your business. I will be writing more blogs that talk about how to build systems into your business and personal life. Please follow me to get notified when I publish new blogs.
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