. . . and so hows your day going

I’ll bet if you ask most any women how she puts on her makeup she will be able to step by step tell you and explain why certain things go on before other things, and how this way is the quickest way to do it.

For the ease of it I’m just going to call this “Creating Systems”. Corporations use this phrase or something like it, the martial arts industry uses it to explain how a person should do everything from enrolling a new student to having a birthday party.

Some call it their way of doing things others say it is the right way to do it I have a few systems in place that are there because that’s how I was taught.

We all do it to a certain extent, some because of need, some because trial and error has shown them the best way to do something, and some because they really want to accomplish or complete things.

I have a system put together for my morning. I very methodically go about the process of getting my day started, I’ll bet you do to, right. The night before I setup the coffee maker, I make sure my glasses are in the same place every night, and so on.

So, once we step back and look at it we have thousands of little systems that complete tasks for us all day long, from washing our hair, brushing our teeth, how we like to have the seat fixed in the car, a certain way to fix our coffee each and every time, doing the laundry, getting kids ready, you name it we probable have a system for it.

What is the biggest difference between people that accomplish things and those that don't? Why is it that some people seem to really get a lot done while others seem to be doing a lot and only getting a little done?

Look at the tasks you have that you do every day?

Do some of your tasks have a weak system in place? Do some of them have an incomplete system in place or a system that doesn’t get the job all the way completed?

And, because of a weak and incomplete system, I’ll bet these tasks interfere with most other tasks we’re doing keeping us from accomplishing as much as we should on a day to day bases, it could be something as simple as putting a tool back when we are done so that it is in the same place every time we need it.

Action Plan:
How about we spend some time this week listing our tasks and grading the systems we have in place that complete those tasks.
How about we grade our systems for each job we do on a simple scale from 1 to 10.
10 being obviously perfect and a score of 4 for anything that doesn’t get the job completed.
Our goal should be to score a 7 or 8 on all our tasks.
Any task that doesn’t score that high should get a hard look at the system in place and changes made to improve it.

And remember, if we have had a weak system in place for years and haven’t paid much attention to accomplishing this task in a system like manner it’s not going to fix itself quickly. It may take many tries to get something in place that works well and completes the task.