Living a life by design requires more than wishful thinking. It takes developing an action plan, strategies for growth, and adopting resources you need to keep moving forward.
The greatest secret to personal growth and high productivity is adopting and developing systems for everything. Michael Gerber the author of the E-Myth says that “systems permit ordinary people to achieve extraordinary results predictably.”
What is a system? It is a process for predictably achieving a goal based on repeatable practices. These repeatable practices are well defined and developed with the end in mind.
As an avid collector of interesting quotes, thoughts, concepts, and ideas, I found I lacked a system. My office was cluttered with stacks of “yellow tablets” with random bits and pieces of interesting wisdom. I lovingly called my process of filing “the piled higher and deeper method.“ I once told my children “When I die, they will discover that I was crazy, or I was brilliant.”
I finally created a system. When reading an article, I would tear out the page, note the topic on the top and denote where it should be filed. When I read a book, if I found an idea, phrase, topic, or quote, I would make a note in the front of the book with the page number and the topic. My assistant would then find the pages, type the material, and save it in a computer folder under the specific topic.
After defining the system and testing my theory, I began to go through each “yellow pad” and scan them myself, saving the content in a general folder. I dropped the folder into the google drive shared with my virtual assistant, Melanie, who would then review and type the documents and store them under the designated topic. This action alone has cleared my desk and my mind of clutter.
My second system was for thinking. When I drive, my mind is freed to think of ideas or listen to podcasts. If I ran across a topic that I wanted to save, my struggle was how to document this content while driving. That was the case until I found a recording app on my phone that could record and transcribe. It is called voice recorder. This simple app allows me to use my thinking time wisely and save those valuable nuggets of thought for a later time.
Strategies and systems have freed me to be more organized and more productive in my writing, teaching, and speaking business. These strategic systems have allowed me to create more content and spend more time sharing my knowledge with others.
