“Every activity contains a series of steps that must be completed correctly to be successful. Systemize your success. Identify the critical steps required to complete your most productive and rewarding activities. Then, create a ‘well-oiled machine’ to automatically crank out results for you. Systemize those steps through technology, checklists, delegation, or by enrolling additional team members—and you will achieve the results you expect—far more often.”  (www.TodaysTQ@ThinkTQ.com)

I like to tease my friends by telling them I am the laziest man I know. And I’m kidding but I’m not. I’m not kidding in that I’m always looking for an easier way, a better way to do more with less, any way that allows me to do more of what I love to do and less of what I must do in order to get where I want to go.

A long time ago I figured out that creating an organization, a team, was the simplest way to do more. There is a limit to what I personally can do, there is a limit to the number of hours in a day. But even before I had an organization I knew the key to doing more with less, even by myself, my solitary self, lay in the root word of “organization”: organize, to be organized!

If I were organized, if I were focused, if I had a goal and a plan to reach it, if I had a system, I could do more, be more successful much sooner. I would frequently think about how I could teach others to do what I was doing.

As I took action, I often pondered the key principles, the underlying philosophy behind my decisions, attempting to tease out a system that I could instruct others to follow. Instinct and intuition were great but I needed a method I could teach, an organizational structure that I could roll out, could replicate over and over, that others could duplicate and follow.

What ways can you systemize your success? What ways can you automate your way to your goals? Create habits and routines that support those goals? Remember: The secret of your future lies in your routines.

This is a classic from the NSC Blog archive, originally posted September 22, 2008.