System vs. To Do List -- Which Tasks do you focus on?

When we're working with small teams at ProcessDriven and they are getting ready to start systemize the operations of their business or their team, we're often having people start by figuring out a way to write down your day to day tasks. This way of managing your work is something we call capacity defense, or you could call task management, and that itself is a system. However, your to do list, just having a list of things you need to do while it's apart of a system, a to do list by itself is not the same as having your business be systemized, having pipelines and processes that work can move through. In this video, I want to just briefly explain the difference between a to do list and a list of one off projects and systems with which you can move work through. Okay, let's go. First off, let's define what this kind of project to do list, task stuff is. What does that mean when I say we have a to do list? Well, a to do list is simply a list, a defined area where we put the things we need to do. That's easy. They are mostly reactive things, meaning something happens, we think of something, something pops up and we create the task force for it. Tasks are predominantly independent, meaning we'll have a task for the grocery list, we'll have a task for the client project. We'll just create tasks as they come up, each one as a standalone item that we need to do in a task list. We are throwing everything we need to do into it and it becomes this very big pile of shoulds. And the reason you do things on your task list is because you think it is important. But as many of you might know from having a very long to do list, the longer the list, the harder it is to remember why something is important. In fact, the longer your to do list, the far more likely it will be that the tasks you have on that to do list will not actually get done either on time or maybe even at all. When we are creating a pile of things that we need to do, whether it's related to a theme or just in general, we're maybe defining a project, but ultimately we are building a to do list. A to do list by itself being a series of discrete actions that are reactive to the world that's happening outside and just telling us, hey, you do this. Yeah, that's a system, our task management system. We've got it there by putting all the tasks together, but the tasks themselves are not necessarily reflecting an understanding of other systems. So briefly, let me switch our gears over to what a System. System is a system. Over on this other imaginary side is a collection of processes, a connection of predefined routes and years that are kind of spinning and doing their thing. When we think of a system, we think interconnected. One action affects the next action affects the next action. When we think systems, we think defined. There's usually a name to the whole container, such as our sales system system, our marketing system, our client retention system. Now, these systems are collections of things that all impact each other. But inside these systems are tasks. Just like over here in the to do list land, we have tasks. Systems also have actions and tasks that need to happen. But the difference is, with a system, by how it's organized or by how we conceptualize it, those tasks impact other things. If we have a task to send a kickoff call for a customer or a client, then we know that's going to impact when we can collect on the first invoice, or when we can have the first onboarding call, or when we can have the first deliverable go out. In a system, we know that our tasks are connected to other items that we have going on. And the more things that move into that system, the more new clients coming in, we know, the more kickoff calls we're going to have in the next and the next and the next. It just kind of goes through like a conveyor belt. With a system, we have the steps in place whether or not someone is actually moving through that system. For example, our hiring system or hiring and training, whether we are hiring and training somebody right now or not, the system still exists. We still know what the steps are. It's still on our radar, preferably it's still visual inside our work management platform. That's a system. Let's contrast that real quick. If we go over to our task list, if we are not currently hiring somebody, are we going to see anything about hiring on our task list? No, the task list is living in the moment. It's just telling us what needs to happen right now for some arbitrary reason. Over here system are those predefined trails, those hiking paths, those conveyor belts that consist of many actions that are sitting there ready to go. And task lists are just showing us in the moment what needs to happen. Because systems reflect interconnected steps. Systems are usually easier to motivate yourself to do because unlike a task list, you know, if you don't do this thing, it'll affect the next thing. And so that motivation and interconnectedness can ensure things actually move forward. So task list over here, what we need to do right now. Systems over here are collections of paths that we might need to walk down. They're sitting there ready, but we may not have someone walking down those paths right now. System, task. Got it. Kind of be inside each other, but still. Now if this wasn't confusing enough, I want to give you kind of a compare and contrast as to how a task could be a part of a system or a task could just be a standalone task. Okay, so let's just take a task of throw out our dead house plants. Has anyone done this? Throw out your dead house plants is something that would be a discrete task. It's not part of an ongoing system we have unless you're really good at killing your house plants. And so that is something you would see on your to do list as a standalone individual task that you may or may not procrastinate. That's something on your task list. But let's think. If we wanted to be proactive around the topic of houseplants, we wanted to make sure we no longer had to do those reactive throw out or dead house plant tasks. Is there a way we could have a system for ensuring that never happens? Could we have some interconnected steps that happen to ensure our plants are alive? Let's think about it. Let's build a system mean, let's define a system for ourselves of houseplant maintenance, for lack of a better word. Inside that system, let's do some defined steps that we are consistently going to do. That might mean a one time task of buying better planters. It might be an ongoing task of checking the water ph and light levels. It might be an ongoing task of regularly fertilizing our houseplants. All of those things, which are a combination of one off tasks and recurring tasks, make this into a system that we can identify as a unit. We have a name for. And we can think, hey, when that task shows up that says fertilize your houseplants, we know why that matters and what that connects to. In terms of the big picture result in this case the plant maintenance system, the big picture result that that system is going to serve for us is having happy alive houseplants in our house. Just like that, we have switched from having just a task or a series of tasks to a system. The difference between them, even if the tasks were in both places, is the fact that we are being intentional. We're reflecting on how things connect and we're giving it a unified name so we could measure how well this system is doing. We could systemize how well this system is operating and we can actually, if this was in a business context, we could hire or delegate somebody to own this functioning system. It's hard to do that if we only were focused on the reactive tasks. So again, let's think of the delegation example. If I had a task of throwing out dead houseplants, I mean, you would hardly hire somebody to help you to just throw out a few houseplants, right? But as soon as we start observing this as a continual system, maybe we start thinking, oh, maybe, you know, it's time to pay my kid an allowance to take care of my plants for me or something like that. In which case we can start to view this as something delegation worthy because it's ongoing, consistent, and it'll obviously continue to go on as we have plants inside that system. Another example of a task versus a system would be something like answering emails. I don't know about you guys, but I've done it. I know people who do it. Where you receive an important email, you don't want to forget about it. So you set a reminder on your phone saying, don't forget about your email, right? What you've done right there is created a one off task for yourself to send that email you can't forget or to check that email. That is a one off task. And like many of us, we might delay that task because it just seems like, okay, it's an email. It doesn't seem like it's connected to anything. It feels like a one off little chore that we need to do just because mom tells us to. Okay, but let's think about this as if it were a system. Let's say we wanted to be more intentional and systemized about our email inbox management. All of a sudden it's no longer a question of, oh, go answer Bob's email. Now we can start thinking about, all right, if we want to make an inbox system, a series of actions, steps, training tools, etc. To make my inbox a less stressful place to be, what would that look like? Well, it probably would involve answering Bob for that one email, but it would probably involve some daily, weekly, monthly routines. Every day I probably want to sort my inbox. Every day I want to answer the important emails. Maybe every month I want to look at themes in the emails that I've sent or received to see if I can delegate them. Maybe every month, maybe you want to like pull a report on the how many emails you've had to deal with. I don't know, whatever you want to measure and track here. But we can start to turn this in to an inbox system when we start to view it that way as these series of interconnected processes of how to respond to emails, how to sort emails, how to delegate emails. We can put this in a little box, a little bundle, and we can start to get it off of our plates, we can start to optimize it, we can start to automate it, we can start to delegate it. I don't know about you, but if I just saw the task answer Bob's email, I don't know that that would trigger in me the desire or the inspiration to start automating how we categorize our email. That level of improvement, that self awareness that comes when you've defined it as a system, when you've made it a connected group of things and responsibilities that you can start to see the patterns of. But if we're constantly reacting, doing one task at a time, it's very hard to see the pattern when you're only looking at one point of data. When we define things as a system, all of a sudden we're watching as people go down that metaphorical hiking trail, we're seeing where they get caught on dead ends. We can start improving the way that process, that system runs and all of a sudden we can truly say we're systemizing our business by making that path better, by making inbox management clearer, not just by finishing the task that's reactive proactively. Re we could be making our inbox something our VA handles for us. And related to that, if you want to delegate your inbox, I actually have a video or playlist actually about that content up at the top. That's what I'm talking about here. When it comes to task list versus a system. Task list is reactive, one off, isolated. And a system is this interconnected, reflective approach of figuring out what is happening, watching it, observing it, bundling it together and improving it. Having a task list is a form of a system actually. But it is not by itself your systems. It is just one. It is just your task management process and there are so many others like inbox management, home maintenance, client onboarding, client offboarding, sales, content marketing, whatever it is. There are so many systems out there that you can and should define, explore and expand on for your team that I don't want to get you, I don't want to see you get hung up on your task list thinking that that is the be all end all. Okay? So if you are looking to feel more control, feel a little bit more proactive in your business. I encourage you to think about this in term of systems. Keep that task list by all means for those one off freak things. But when you see those tasks start to come up, question Is this a part of a broader system that I can define and be proactive about? It's like expenses versus Investments. Folks. Can we be proactive here in some way? Now, if you need a little help thinking about the systems in your business, I do have a training in the. What, what's the word? Description? That thing below the video here where you can actually watch a free training where we go through a way that I find really helpful for defining the processes of your business. You want to check that out, feel free. Otherwise, thanks so much for watching and until next time, enjoy the process.