Every time I handed something over to my assistant, we did the same thing.
We got on a call. I did the task while recording it. Then I wrote it down in a Google Doc, simple bullet points, the fewest words I could manage. She went away and did it on her own. Then she came back and did it again in front of me, thinking out loud, so I could catch the step I had skipped because I never noticed myself doing it.
Half the time, the writing down was what killed the step.
I would get to the middle of the document and stop, because that part produced nothing. Nobody read the output. It had been in there a year because it was in there the year before.
Then I took whatever survived and made it faster. That is the part worth talking about, because I think it’s where most of us are still standing.
The saving was in the deleting, and we went for the speed
Look at what the new tools got asked to do inside most companies.
A report that took four hours takes twenty minutes. An email that needed a person needs a prompt. The time came back, the money was real, nobody made that up.
Go one question deeper and it gets uncomfortable. Did anyone ask whether the report should exist? Did anyone ask who reads it? Because the forty minute version should not have existed either. We did not fix the process. We made something that should not exist run faster. It’s like going efficiently to the wrong place.
I saw the same thing in nearly every business I got close to. Most owners did not have a workflow at all. It lived in their head (I’m working on a solution for that!). There was structure in there, sometimes a lot of it, but nothing written down, nothing anybody else could pick up and hold. So there was nothing to delete, because there was nothing to look at.
Some of them were protecting it on purpose. I have had that conversation more than once.
“If I write down what I do, they will not need me any more.”
That fear does real damage, because the person (usually the owner) guarding their own process is the person who cannot improve it.
So my own rule moved. The documenting is not preparation for the automating. The documenting is where most of the saving already sits. By the time I have written something down in the fewest words I can manage, the process has usually lost a step, and I have not touched a tool yet.
The trouble is that deleting a step means admitting the step was pointless, and that it was probably me who put it there.
I know it’s hard to do that. It’s admitting defeat in front of your team. But you know what? It’s a really decent example of good leadership. You’re not perfect, so what’s the problem with that? Everyone is imperfectly human. Quite refreshing in the AI era, no?
Go and hear it from Chris
Chris Robino has been doing search engine optimisation since 2007, and he says he has been fired from every job he ever had 😂. That second part is where the rest of it came from: he cannot sit still in front of a process that is worse than it needs to be.
I put all of this to him and he took it further than I did, with better stories than mine and one line that has been in my head ever since:
“If you’re 10 mistakes away, when do you want to get started on the mistake making?”
Near the end it stopped being clean. He admitted there is one system in the world he controls completely, and he cannot apply any of this to it. What he said next is his to tell, not mine, and it’s the best two minutes of the whole thing (I’m biased, though).
It’s on YouTube too, just in case you prefer to watch it there 😉
Cheers
Gledsley
