Another avenue for improving your productivity and efficiency is to focus on creating standard operating procedures, or SOPs for short. By doing so, you can greatly streamline not just everyday tasks, but also make unique or more difficult tasks more manageable. This can be good not just for your bottom line, but also for the morale of your workers.
If you're a business professional, I'm sure you created an expense report or two in your career. If you work for a company with no process in place for this task, the first time you do it you're going to flounder as you determine what information is needed, how to provide your receipts, who does the report go to, etc. If you anticipate that you'll be creating more expense reports in the future, you might create a form or format with all the required information in your favorite word processor or spreadsheet app. And unbeknownst to you, you've now just created an SOP. The next time you need to perform the task, you'll be able to get through the process in a fraction of the time and effort.
But not all SOPs you create solely for your own use. Much of the time they're created and shared with others. If you're part of the HR department, that expense spreadsheet you just created could be rolled out to the entire company to save everyone time. This seemingly small process, can quickly start being incredibly meaningful to your bottom line in costs savings while reducing the agony for employees to file their business expenses each month.
Or changing gears a bit, maybe you run the local screen print shop for your town. You've been in the industry for what seems like forever, so it's natural for you to count out apparel before going to press as well as after, in order to make sure you have sufficient quantities and sizes, and that these match up to the customer order. But as you grow and add new workers to your shop, some may not have this background knowledge and might miss portions of this process along the way. Having a SOP, in this case potentially just a checklist, could be a huge lifesaver for new employees and those how haven't memorized the production process from start to finish. This simple improvement can help make tremendous strides in keeping your shop productive and running like a well oil machine.
SOPs can be something as easy as a punchlist to a software tool that is custom tailored to a particular workflow. They don't always have to be fancy or complex and in some scenarios might just be a set of documentation. You should strive to create SOPs that are easy to perform and that create as few hurdles to process as possible. Over time using them should become second nature.
A great SOP example is that of Steve Jobs. It's widely know that he had a closet full of identical black turtlenecks, jeans and tennis shoes. The idea was to reduce the decision fatigue, or mental energy it took him, to get ready in the morning. By creating a SOP to streamline his closet, he was able to spend more time and mental energy on other more important tasks in his day.
Today is a great day to begin looking at areas where you can standardize processes for your business, team and also yourself. Look for all ways, large and small, that can contribute to improved performance and efficiency. Through time, you'll be able to keep adding new SOPs that can multiply your improvements and help your business to excel.