10 Days

Questions of the week: Why does the 10-Day challenge start with logging personal time and writing SOP? Why does the 10-day challenge not to be done at once? What is STOPing you from becoming a strategic thinker?

I write this article based on the insight of my conversation with my team in our monthly 1-on-1 call. I speak with each one of my team members. This article is a compilation of a whole week's takeaway. You can subscribe to the?Building our Team?newsletter (2000+ subscribers)

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Why does the 10-Day challenge start with logging personal time and writing SOP?

The 10-day system challenge is something that I have taken part in a coaching program, and it is a byproduct of it. It's a straightaway copy-pasted of that program, and I've changed the examples and terminology that suit our team specifically.?

The first reason is that the first four challenges look at your personal life and create SOPs for your personal life. My analysis of why this is important is as follows:-

For example, Once you start practising, it has to be on your home front, and it helps you walk on your own (Confidence). Once you develop some skills, you can enter the competition professionally or at least at some level. Similarly, when it starts with your personal time, it becomes easier for you because there are some repeated activities that you do on a daily basis, especially in the morning routines where you have a ritual, and there is nothing to be reinvented.?

Everyone does a repeated activity each morning. Remember, Repeation = SOP opportunity. It can be dropping your child to school, going to the gym, going for a walk, doing some personal hygiene, making your breakfast etc.

So, some of the things you do make you different from the rest of us, and that gives a nice playground to practise SOPs and systems thinking. Also, if you see the challenge only in the first four days, we are talking about your personal activity, and then we translate it into the work activity. It's a good way to transform into learning the craft of building systems.?

In case you are NOT comfortable sharing. You can put it under personal time, family time, miscellaneous, or things you want to hide. You can use things like planting water daily or playing with something with some games or something that do very often, and if you have a system that or real steps that you can record, that is something that we are looking for.?

The whole thing is while doing it; there is a section in the goal sheet to share your fears, insights, feedback, thoughts, findings, tricks, tips etc. All those things naturally flow in terms of design. When it comes to personal things, you can brain-dump everything you experience. Writing disconnected points, no need to polish the answers. Answer like it is 10-15 marks, and share all your thoughts as a rough cut.

Why does the 10-day challenge not to be done at once?

The idea of the 10-day challenge is to do one challenge at a time and the design of the system was created so that you feel free from being overwhelmed by too much work or workload.?

The idea is to understand everything first and do it at once, and to submit the assignment at once is bad here because we are trying to change the school of thought here.?

The objective is to learn from the assignment and not to complete it. Only completing it for the sake of completing it is a waste of your time.?

The system works best in the beginning when you break it down step by step and focus only on the task in your hand. The other thing is about telling lies in a way that's very often in our culture that we are working on. If the system is broken into multiple pieces and if you are working on it, you have at least some milestone or some evidence of the work that you have done.

It could be the first draft, the rough cut, the incomplete time log, incomplete steps, incomplete SOPs or anything. If you're working, there will always be progress that you will make, and you cannot lie about it; you cannot cheat about it, and that shows more about your integrity and your character in doing that's one thing that's more important when you are thinking in terms of systems because that is what is required if you want to increase the value and I have to remember that working on the system should be Urgent and important.?

Any client work which is Urgent and important should go before that. Still, after that, this should be your priority, and all the important and non-urgent work should be pushed down the priority list because this tool will help you work less and produce more results or outcomes in the future.?

This is very important from your career point of view also.

Suppose you don't have an attitude of taking charge of your work and learning about your systems. In that case, it will be very difficult to understand the underlying subtleness of the system's power.

You will only learn it have enough practice, and it could not be as powerful as you wish. You have to put in the initial heavy-lifting work regarding understanding. Do not assume anything, as you are not even qualified to assume a single thing in terms of the system because you are learning from scratch.?

In the past, you have shown that most of you have shown that you are struggling with understanding it 100%; you are getting some ideas and some not, so when you have anything, any assumption with your assignment or anything, you have to reach out to me or any of your colleagues or read all the instructional videos or guide videos before assuming anything.

I will end with this; You cannot eat for the entire month on the 1st of every month; similarly, your brain also cannot be over feed.?

What is STOPing you from becoming a strategic thinker?

This is very important, especially at the time of pressure or time of crisis.?

If you start with you have tried everything, that means you need to be allowing yourself to think strategically. You are doing yourself a disservice.?

If you are faced with a challenging situation and are in a mess, list down all the tactics you have given that have put you in a situation. It's a sugarcoated excuse or thing you should STOP doing.?

We need to understand that there are peacetime and wartime leaders; if we apply a strategy of peacetime leaders in a wartime situation, we cannot expect the same results. When you are in a war zone, you have to change your strategy.

Start thinking on paper and pen is what will help you change the pattern, thinking with some open view of a beach or a big park or a big book Garden, big playground, big Museum, big railway station or any place where it's a little bit nice that could help you because strategy is 30,000 feet.

Complaining, putting your guard up and playing the blame game when you are hit by a failure, loss, or criticism is not helping you. Owning your mistake would be the best thing; owning it completely would be better. It shows you are an abundant thinker and you have a long-term vision.?

I take ownership of all the mistakes that is made by the team. The reason is that the company is not designed in a way that makes the team member make fewer mistakes. The systems are not completely developed yet. You must STOP digging first when you are in a hole and want to come out. Strategic thinking and building a system will only help you avoid getting into the same situation repeatedly.?

We will have to give one hour or 30 minutes to the important work of building a system, and strategic thinking is one of the raw ingredients. The real Achievers know how to figure that out.

Start saying no to small things here and there, and you will be surprised how those little no can save you maybe 20 to 25 hours, and that is magic because it saves you a week that's good enough to do important work for a month or two.?

The last one is all about truth and honesty. Suppose you are leaning towards cheating, white lies on a small level of dishonesty. Not spreading the bad news faster is like being dishonest to your teammates and clients.?

When you start hiding smaller mistakes with the client during a crisis, that is the biggest mistake from a strategy point of view because the client assumes that everything is perfect and happy at our end and they can expect something. Talking big about trust and being dishonest is a bad combination.?

You should first be able to trust yourself, be honest and Own up to your mistakes; whatever you think you don't know or the unknowns, be as much honest with yourself. Even though you might feel ambitious about your capabilities, just put a pinch of salt in every decision you make and criticise yourself.?

Telling confidently that 73bit right now cannot handle 30 clients is the truth and the reality openly and even when we have eight clients going live at once, the team comes under tremendous pressure.??

It takes quite courage to accept and communicate the fact to the clients as early as possible if the team doesn't feel confident in delivery.

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