Overwhelm is a thing, but this is one case in which you should NOT trust the thing.
There are so many possibilities out there, so many places to start documenting your business processes, that it can become overwhelming. You can easily get stuck in “where to start” so that you never get started.
In order to overcome overwhelm, you must make some decisions. In your business, you’ve already made some major decisions: Who to serve, what to provide, and how to provide it. This keeps things separated into ‘Do’ and ‘Not Do’ buckets.
If you:
- Serve knitters, you don’t have to talk about crochet or computers.
- Provide Kitchen items, you don’t have to provide bedroom or car items.
- Are strictly online, you don’t have to have a brick and mortar space.
You don’t have to think about the possibilities of those things. You just look at them, say, “No, I don’t do that.”, and walk away.
Overwhelm: “Where to start?”
When getting started on writing your first process document, it’s the same thing. You must make a decision. The first decision is to decide what level of process you’re going to write.
There are many process levels that can be defined in a business:
- Business 100K ft view – How departments work together
- Department 60K ft view – How the teams within a department work together
- Team 30k ft view – Tasks the team is responsible for and how individuals work together
- Individual 10 ft view – Tasks the individual is responsible for and how those tasks work together and fit in the team responsibilities.
My suggestion is to start at the Individual level. Pick one task you do. Start with an easy yet impactful process, one that:
- Might move your business forward if you just had all the Activity Steps listed out
- Is a pain point, you hate doing, is not in your realm of genius
- Is costly either in time, distraction, stress, or money
- You “hide in” or “keep busy with” but could easily be handed off to someone else
- You know someone else could do better, faster, cheaper
- Is fun for you…you never know, this could become something that you could pass on to your clients as well!
Something easy and fun
If you start with something easy and fun, you will be able to learn while being engaged and not stressed out. Then, when it comes to writing out a process for something that is a little more complicated, or not your zone of genius, you’ll have the practice and experience of doing the work to support you. It won’t be new and confusing, and you won’t get tripped up by the HOW.
Use these questions to identify where you could start documenting your business processes. To go further, and transfer years of knowledge clearly, efficiently, and effectively, click HERE to get the First Step to Cloning Yourself free downloadable PDF which will walk you through the process of picking your first process.