Make the Process—Don't Be the Process

It's easy to end up taking on every new task and treating it like something you've never done before.

A new design for a web page comes in. A new process for task management is put into place. A new blog post needs a featured image.

If you treat everything like a brand new challenge, no matter how easy the task is or how complex the new process, you lose out on a lot of time, energy, and efficiency.

In reality, there are a lot of overlapping tasks, behaviors, steps, or processes that make up our work. I've spent a lot of time examining my work and I've found a lot of these similarities can be used to my advantage—especially in helping conserve energy and reduce stress, which are vital to me being able to work well despite having MS.

Although invention and creativity can be messy, there are specific ingredients that are repeatable and reusable.

That's the sweet spot: finding or building something that works with a lot of use cases. Refining things down so that even though the requests coming in are different and unique, your tools, your knowledge, and your processes are ready to meet those new assignments.

As an employee, I think what it really comes down to is: being an SOP or creating the SOP.

An SOP is a Standard Operating Procedure, and it's basically a checklist or outline of some business process. Whether you've had one given to you or you've internalized one for the task at hand, you are using SOPs in your work all the time.

If you're a developer, do you use git to push code changes to a certain repo? Do you do a QA check at some point? Are there certain things that have to be done before your changes go live? That's probably an SOP.

If you're a designer, do you choose a canvas size for a new graphic? Do you export your images with certain settings for a specific place? Do you always start with wireframes and have check-ins with teammates before creating the hi-res mock-up? Those are SOPs.

It's how the work gets done—and usually it's how the work gets done specifically at your company, because workflows often vary from team to team, at least in the details.

Here's where we have a major productivity boosting potential: creating the SOPs, rather than internalizing them.

You have a limited capacity for decision making, task switching, and memory. There are constraints we face as humans day-to-day, and especially if you have other impacting factors with health, disability, or any number of things. Why then, do we try to keep everything we need in our brains?

Let's take an ad campaign as an example. You're a designer who's tasked with creating the ads. Most likely, you'll look at the dimensions of the ad sizes that you need, you'll pop open Photoshop (or other design tool), create a canvas for the first one. Then you'll grab your brand colors for the background, add text, find a button, export it and start on the next one.

Pretty straightforward, but there's room to make this even faster and less stressful under a time crunch. The intuitive way you do things is not always the most effective. That's the problem with defaulting to the internalized SOP—it's hard to examine, it only surfaces when you're doing those tasks, and you're forced to make lots of tiny decisions about how to accomplish the task over and over again.

Let's revisit the process and find spots to develop our SOP.

SOP / Automation decision tree

Write it out

First, we're going to write out that intuitive process. Either before you started the task or just looking back, write down each step you took. Now we have our SOP base and we can look for ways to optimize the process.

Examine your process

Most likely there is an ad platform your company almost always uses. That platform will have requirements for sizes. You could create templates for each size, meaning that you won't have to look them up again or waste time creating the right-sized canvas in the future. Or you could even use Photoshop actions to automatically create or resize a canvas for you.

You may also make use of Adobe's libraries, which allow you to create assets or even define brand colors that are shared across the team so you don't have to look them up or find files in the bottomless pit of Dropbox folders.

Optimize and Update

Now that we've identified those parts of the ad-creation process that can be optimized, make those changes, update the SOP and try following it step by step. If you forgot something or parts of it seem clunky, revise it.

Make it findable

Put that SOP somewhere you'll find it again and pull it out every time you need to do that task, and now you can zoom through it.

Obviously, you don't have to have an SOP for literally every task that you do at work. Some SOPs also might have connections to other, unrelated tasks as well. I tend to create SOPs when a task is:

Infrequent, but high-stakes
Tedious or complex
And / or takes too much energy to remember specifics or details

My New Favorite SOP

I'll give you one more example I recently did for my home insurance that checks all those boxes.

Due to some silly (and highly inefficient) rules with my mortgage and my HOA, I have to send proof of insurance that my HOA provides over to my mortgage company every year. The first couple of years I would get a threatening letter reminding me I needed to do this, and I would have to dig through a bunch of papers to find the insurance carrier contact info. I had to find the previous year's email to the insurance since it had the correct info that they needed to look me up.

Then I would wait for the email back with a PDF that I then had to upload to my mortgage company's website on some random page that, again, I had to look up.

This is the perfect task for an SOP, even though it's not work-related. It has to be done every year. There's no way I'm going to remember everything, especially the contact and request info I have to send. This is how I solved it:

Each year, I have an email automatically send to my insurance carrier, pre-populated with the information I need to send. Instead of a threatening letter in my real mailbox alerting me it's time to do this, I see an email reply from my insurance company. That's my trigger to go look up this SOP in Obsidian, my favorite tool for knowledge management. Then I download the PDF, click on the link in my notes, auto-fill the form and upload the PDF. The last step is to create next year's email and schedule it to send and I'm done.

I went from a stressed out, week-long process to a 10 minute process that accomplished everything I needed ahead of schedule.

Control the Process—Not Vice Versa

Ultimately, you have the opportunity in most things to control your process. Wherever you have that control, try and refine the process. Write it out. Test it. Automate parts of it—or the entire thing.

Develop your process by writing it out, then follow the cycle of examination, optimization, testing, and updating.

You are a human, after all, and that means you have unique creative, strategic, and visionary capabilities. Don't divert your energy that could go towards those capabilities. Let the easily repeatable, tedious, or administrative tasks be done by a computer or by a streamlined, easy-to-follow SOP that you've created and refined.