The blog

Does the fact that you fre­quent­ly do duties which you have per­formed before, only in a dif­fer­ent month, for a dif­fer­ent project or for a dif­fer­ent cus­tomer, sound familiar?

It may involve extract­ing sta­tis­tics, doing a month­ly report, ini­ti­at­ing a deliv­ery to a new client or some­thing like this. Per­haps you read a struc­tur­al tip I pub­lished a while back in which I advised you to cre­ate a sim­ple check­list of all steps in the tasks you per­form every now and then, so that you do not have to make the effort of recall­ing what it is you usu­al­ly do when you are … (what­ev­er it may be about).

Is it also famil­iar that you have so much to do that you are not up to or capa­ble of assem­bling neat, com­plete, well-struc­tured check­lists or process descrip­tions? It is com­mon to feel hes­i­tant about intro­duc­ing a tool which would great­ly facil­i­tate you work for the sole rea­son that it feels like too much work to get start­ed with the tool itself, in spite of know­ing that it would be good for us.

Do not feel deject­ed — the world is designed in such a way that you do not need to do a com­plete doc­u­men­ta­tion of each rou­tine. It will suf­fice to a lit­tle, espe­cial­ly to begin with.

One thing we can learn from the folk musician

I have a good friend who not only is my fel­low vio­lin-fid­dler, but also a high­ly skilled folk musi­cian. If you are famil­iar with the Swedish folk music reper­toire, you will know that there is an incred­i­ble amount of songs and that you rarely play by sheet music. This means that you will have to remem­ber how all the pieces are played once you get togeth­er to play.

Rather than car­ry­ing a few box­es of sheet music with her, she car­ries a much thin­ner bun­dle of sheet music in which she has writ­ten out how every song (that she knows) start, for exam­ple, the first four bars. If she begins to play the first bars aid­ed by the score, she remem­bers the rest of the song, and off she goes.

This sounds famil­iar. If only I can get start­ed, the rest often comes by itself. The beau­ty of this is that we can use this expe­ri­ence when it comes to describ­ing our routines.

Do this

1. Chose one of the rou­tines, tasks or things you do in a sim­i­lar way on a some­what recur­ring basis.
2. When you are about to do it next time, open an emp­ty doc­u­ment in your favorite word-processor.
3. If it feels too much to describe the entire rou­tine, begin with the first steps, for instance, the first three steps. Write ​“First…”, ​“Then…”, and ​“And after that…” as you go through the process and come to think of how you usu­al­ly do it.
4. Leave the doc­u­men­ta­tion after those first three steps and save the check­list in the one and only place where you keep these (so that you will be able to find it eas­i­ly) under a clear and descrip­tive name.
5. The next time you are about to per­form the rou­tine, take out the check­list with the three first steps and fol­low it.
6. Notice if you con­tin­ue with the task auto­mat­i­cal­ly once you have got­ten start­ed or if you would need to describe the rest of the steps as well for the check­list to be tru­ly help­ful. Adjust it if you need to.
7. If you feel that it ful­fills its pur­pose, begin doc­u­ment­ing anoth­er rou­tine, and anoth­er one, et c.

Here is the point of it all

If you make the thresh­olds to get­ting start­ed low with this method, you will have more time for oth­er things since the time it takes you to adjust to a new task decreas­es, since you get start­ed faster, since you spend less time recall­ing the pro­ce­dure. Besides, it is nice to not pro­cras­ti­nate what you tend to push ahead of you due to not quite remem­ber­ing how to do it. 

The risk of only doc­u­ment­ing the begin­ning of the tasks is that you might not remem­ber how to pro­ceed when you have tak­en the first three steps you have writ­ten down. And this will leave you strand­ed where you stopped documenting. 

If you feel you can take that risk, enjoy not hav­ing to do com­plete check­lists and that you still prof­it great­ly from the work you have done previously.

It works for my fid­dler-friend – per­haps it will work for you as well.

How do you do it?

What is you way of not hav­ing to think too hard about what to do when you are about to per­form a rou­tine task? Leave a com­ment to let me and oth­er read­ers know.