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documenting your processes not only helps to improve your efficiency but it's actually necessary if you ever want to scale and grow your business by having a checklist in place and detailed notes of how to complete a specific task or process you can be more efficient because you're not having to remind yourself of the process every single time and you're less likely to forget an important step which if you do might actually set you back later on as I've grown my business I've also learned that I need to have good documented processes in place so that when I'm giving a task to somebody they can do the task quickly and efficiently without my input and they can follow the steps to the standard that I require and if I ever replace people on my team or somebody new comes into a role and they start doing that task they can then pick up and learn the new process really quickly in short having well-documented processes in place will improve the efficiency of your team and improves the quality of the results and my role as the business owner is to put these processes in place that's kind of what I see my job is to do these days more and more is refine the process get everything documented down as much as possible now I believe that the test of whether you've documented something clearly and successfully is can you give that process to somebody who's never done it before and can they follow a checklist of you know tasks and have you provided good enough notes and instructions so that they can follow the process they can execute on that task and complete the job or the work to the standard that you require without any additional input or training from you if so great because you've outlined the process clear enough where there's no extra input needed and I think that's that's what we should be aiming for in documenting our processes so with that in mind I want to share a couple of the ways and a couple of the tools that I've used to document various processes within my business now it'll probably come as no surprise to subscribers of my Channel or listeners of my podcast that a lot of my processes are documented in Asana Asana is where we manage all of our work and for work we have to do on a regular basis we use recurring tasks for example each week my virtual assistant Judy she updates deals in my CRM which is pipedrive and so I have a task assigned to her that repeats every Thursday and when you look at the task in Asana I've included written instructions on what to do so I've bullet pointed out like these are the steps to follow and I've also provided a video recording which I recorded using clean shot X on the Mac and in that recording it shows myself doing the task and explaining how to follow the process and I even in the video walk through examples so that she can see kind of what it is that I'm doing I'm talking through different scenarios so she can follow the instructions in that task she can do the work without any additional input from me for more sporadic work we use task and project templates so for example making a podcast or a YouTube video this is something that it's not always weekly recurring but we we use a template to create a task when needed and in the task and in the subtasks that I assigned to Judy I've got detailed notes and again video instructions showing how to complete each subtask so that she knows exactly what she needs to do now Judy has done this process with me many many times now so when she looks at the task now she doesn't need to really read the notes or watch the video every single time but I keep it there in the task template in Asana so that if I ever have to replace Judy if she's not available if I get a new assistant I can then just assign that task to the new person and they have all the instructions and the video ready to go so it's going to make onboarding that new person very quick and easy we also have tasks in my Asana account for things like filing a GST return in my accounting platform which is zero this is something I do approximately every two months and if I didn't have the process written down I would have to kind of figure it out and remind myself what I need to do each time and I might risk kind of missing a step so instead I've just written down the process for myself so that every two months when I'm doing this task again I can follow the notes go through everything in the correct order and crucially I don't miss an important step two streamline communication with clients and just to make sure we're being really consistent with what we say and when sharing next steps things like that we use text expander Now text expander is a tool I've talked about many times on my YouTube Channel and podcasts before basically it allows me to store text so for things like an email template and then I can type a little snippet like a semicolon and then the word proposal and this will spit out some text with this email template ready to go and the way I see it is a template an email template is a bit like having a documented process because now rather than having a separate document or note with what we need to say we've stored it in textexpander so we can quickly access that that copy that we like to use and we can be really consistent with the messaging and the next steps that we're sharing on a regular basis we're also heavy users of calendly in my business for booking appointments with coaching clients and so I've stored the links for myself but also the members of my team so I can easily share someone's booking link via an email or if I'm on Zoom I can put it in the zoom chat and again we just find it quicker to recall these links using textexpander compared to having it stored in a document or a note somewhere where I have to go and find just having it under my hands where I can type out that snippet and generate that link makes recalling those links and sharing that really quick and easy and the final way I will document a process is sometimes although not that often I will create an actual document or a note that has the information and details of how to do something for example I have a detailed Pages document called my convertkit manual and this outlines how each of the custom fields and tags in my convertkit account are used within different automations and how the fields and tags get updated because I have quite a lot of automation going on in the background it's quite easy to forget why it was set up a certain way or how the system works and my convertkit manual is where I store all the information about these fields now the reason I have this as a document and it's not in Asana is that it's really just information I don't need to do anything with this it's not like I'm following steps in the document it's more that the document is like an instruction manual that outlines how fields and tags work and I just need to have it written down somewhere another example is I have an apple note which outlines how to set up my desk and the lighting in my office before I record a video again it's just information I like to keep this in an apple note rather than in Asana so I have the the details written down of how to set up my office now every business large or small should have its essential processes documented somewhere even if you're just a solo operator I showed you an example earlier of just I've written down the steps for myself of how to complete certain tasks and even the process of writing out the process even that in itself is a useful exercise because it forces you to think about you know when you have to explain it to someone you think about is this the best way of doing it or could we actually improve our process somehow and so I hope this video has been useful and you've got some takeaways that you can go and Implement from here if you have any questions feel free to leave me a comment below thanks for watching and see you in the next video