Systems are great except when they act as a block to forward progress. I am starting to see it as a form of perfectionism. Unless you have the right system in place you can’t do the product launch, video series, whatever.
This post is a subtle nudge for a colleague of mine, and likely for some of you, who have something you want to do in your business, but because the system isn’t in place, you are in neutral and not moving forward.
To be fair, systems are great and necessary to run a sustainable business. However, sometimes you have to just do the thing first, and then put the system in place that allows you to scale.
In the case of my colleague, she has an idea for a video series. She considered several topics and finally narrowed those down to one that got her excited. She then broke that larger topic into specific ideas for short videos related to that topic.
She thought through how she would record one longer video and have it chopped up into smaller bite-sized videos of about one minute in length. She also thought about how she would pull out ideas for quotes and have the audio transcribed into blog posts to leverage the time and effort it took to create the videos.
She even created a spiffy graphic to show how this system would work.
I haven’t seen a video yet and it has been a few weeks.
I nudged her the last time I talked to her. I said, “Done is better than perfect.” I suggested she just take her phone and record something and post it.
She replied that she would be taking the pictures she would use for the video thumbnails that day.
Systems can be a block (and a very seductive one) for our minds. We are trying to do something the right way – the smart way – and yet trying to put the system in place at the beginning is actually blocking our forward progress.
Here is another example. A current client of mine needs to put together a portfolio of his work. He is a writer and people who interview him for contract or full-time jobs will ask him to send writing samples. They may even ask to see his portfolio.
He got stuck on the portfolio word and decided that he had to put together something much fancier than what I think he needs. I think a few representative writing samples in Dropbox or Google Drive would have been good enough. He has been messing around with some other program for a week or more and it still isn’t done.
Good enough is frequently enough. Unnecessary systems or software programs can be a block to your forward progress. This is definitely something to be aware of and to watch out for.
Photo by Milivoj Kuhar on Unsplash
