What are the three important reasons to track your systems?

What are the three important reasons to track your systems? Over the last couple of episodes, we've looked at this interesting definition of what a system is.

And actually, looked up on the internet and said, Hey, what are the definitions of the systems that are out there at the moment? It's quite ancient you can type this into Google and, and things like a set of things working together as parts of a mechanism, or an interconnecting network, a complex whole.

Okay, whatever that means.

That's, I don't know what you made of that.

Number two, is a set of principles or procedures according to which something is done, and an organized scheme or method.

Okay, so that's, that's got some elements of what we've been talking about over the last couple elements the last couple of days.

And the last one, the prevailing political or social order, especially when regarded as oppressive, or intransigent? Well, okay, yeah, not really what we're after.

So that second one's the closest, but I've been giving you a different definition of a system, a repeatable tract actions that lead to defined results, repeatable tracked actions that lead to defined results.

And we've been through each of these words, over the last three episodes, the first one we covered, repeatable, that the idea of a system being something that can be done over and over again, either on a schedule or On Demand.

The second thing we looked at was the idea of defined results, that a system gives defined results.

And it does that because the actions did the same each time.

Now, they do not have to be perfect, but within the tolerance of the defined results, they're going to have to be reasonably close.

If you skip out on actions, or you complete them in the wrong order, then you are unlikely to get those defined results.

And it also gives you the ability to look at the results that you got and say, Hey, is that what I wanted? Is that the defined result that I wanted? And if not, then you can go back and look at the actions and say, Hey, these actions gave that result.

I don't want that result, what would have to change? So the actions we discussed yesterday.

And that leaves one more word, tracked, tracked? Interesting idea.

Now, if you don't track your systems, is this guy going to fall? No, it's not.

But there are three important reasons why you do want to do this now realize that there is a cost to tracking your systems, it takes work to say, Hey, I'm going to track this, I'm going to mark when I'm beginning work on this when I'm working on a particular aspect of a system, a particular set of actions, and perhaps even some of those defined results.

So I'm tracking the actions I'm taking, and I'm tracking the results.

And there's a cost to that.

Like, you got to train yourself and train your team says, Hey, this is important.

And so it helps to know why it is important.

Why would you want to track it? Well, here we go.

Let's number one.

The number one reason you want to track your systems is you can tell who's on what.

Now, this may not come into play and won't come into play.

If it's just you.

If you're a solopreneur, and you're just working yourself, then there's no conflict between who's got what.

But as your team grows, and you begin to have multiple team members working on bigger projects, it helps to know who's working on what, so that they can see, hey, we're going to be held up here, if that's not done on this time, but also so that you don't get on each other's toes that you're not doing the same work that somebody else was doing already.

Like, oh, man, I wish we hadn't done that.

Because you're already doing that.

And you just might have wasted 123 hours, perhaps even 123 days doing work that was already being done by another but you couldn't see it because it wasn't being tracked.

So reason number one, you can tell who's doing what.

Second.

Now, this applies across the board, you can tell where you're up to.

You can tell where you're up to you see if you don't track your systems unless it's the most basic small system where you can get through it in half an hour or less.

And you don't need to really track that unless you're going to get distracted all the time.

Actually, you know what guess what happens people get to attracted all the time, you probably should track your systems all the time.

Even if it's only a 20 minute system.

Why? Because if you get distracted, you can come back and see what you're up to.

If the day ends, you can come back and see where you're up to this is kind of like marking a book, if you're reading a book, and you have to go to sleep, or you have to go and do something else.

Most people will mark that either with a bookmark or folding the page down.

Why do you do that? Well, it takes a lot of time to flick through the book and find out where you are up to.

And this is exactly the same with your work when you're using systems.

Like if you have that long list of actions that need to be taken.

And hopefully, you broke them up nicely.

So you can track them via processes, but even then you might go down to the detail.

And if you can keep the position that you're up to then you know when to return to that work, where to return to that work.

No, oh, there it is.

And you can begin quickly, instead of taking the average estimate is five to six minutes per distraction.

to refund the place that they were up to why because they didn't mark it.

They didn't track it.

But you track it, suddenly, you look where you're up to.

And within 1020 30 seconds, the computer completely shuts down and you lose everything.

You bring it back up.

If your system was tracked, then you can have all of the instructions, all of the materials, all of the pages that you're working on up and ready.

Maybe within one or two minutes.

That typically would be a 1520 minute experience, people looked for all of those links, went through their files, trying to find the files and maybe they went to their recent CINAHL aka Yeah, okay, was it that one, but the naming schemes aren't so great.

So they have to open for documents that are here it is.

And now our where's that back end page, I'm going to log in and go find the backend.

To track all that fast, fast, your teams actually start producing dramatically faster, because you're tracking and suddenly that time expense of investing into tracking starts to massively pay off.

Yeah, it might take five seconds, two seconds to track.

If you've got modern project management software, then this is pretty easy to do, you just click the button and select the right one.

If you're on Asana, if you're on click up from Monday, this is all very basic stuff for that type of software, you click or you're working on it, click Done.

But if you can recover quickly, then you are adding five to six minutes per standard destruction instra distraction, not destruction, destruction, instruction turns into destruction anyway.

But in a big event in a destructive event where the power goes off and you lose everything, you back up much quicker than 15 minutes.

Now, there's a third reason though.

You see if you're a business owner, you're paying your team.

You might have an awkward situation where you come to payroll, you're like, man, whatever, what am I paying for what God done.

And, sure, you can have your team's document everything that got done.

But if you're tracking, it's all right there, you can just go through and see your team's work.

For the week, you'll oh, let's pull up, pull up, Tom have a look at what happened with Tom.

And they will all be the systems and the results and the processes all tracked.

And so you can know who's performing, who's doing well.

Because you can see their workloads.

Suddenly, you don't need to have kind of weird intrusive screen monitoring software or any of that stuff, which takes a lot of time to look at anyway.

But you can just see the work getting done.

You can see who's performing you can see where you're up to you can see what you are paying for.

You can speak to your team members before it come becomes a problem and say, Hey, what's going on with your performance? Perhaps there's something going on in their life, something big and slow.

Hey, you want to know about that? It's not that they're just underperforming, but perhaps is there's a there's some bad things happening in their life and they need to talk about it.

And when that clears up, then their production goes back, or perhaps they've been thinking about leaving, you know, you know what, I'm sick of working here.

And you're like, Oh, really interesting.

Okay.

Yeah, I noticed that your performance has been dropping off.

Like how did you know that? We looked at the reports it's all tracked.

But this requires you to think that the investment in tracking is worth it.

So there are the three reasons Why you want to track your systems? Number one, you can tell who's working on what.

Number two, you can tell where everybody is up to.

And number three, you can tell what got done each week.

I hope you got some value out of that.

If you want to go back and review this entire conversation, I'd certainly recommend that it's this episode and the last four where we covered the definition of a system.

I hope that you find it far more valuable than the ones that you'll find on Google.

And if you want some help with setting up your system so that you can have repeatable tracked actions that lead to define results and head over to System IO dot Dev.

Thanks for tuning in today.

Look forward to seeing on the next episode, we continue this journey into the power systems to create results.

See you then.