One Trusted System

For the same reason that I wear a blue shirt, the same blue shirt that I have five copies of - It's to preserve mental energy. Everybody who owns or helps lead an entrepreneurial business knows about the whirlwind. It's a hundred and thirty six things that are flying at you every day from up, left down, backwards, forwards and diagonal. 

You're the owner and you're the leader. Until you have developed a great team of people who own their seats on the accountability chart, you are making one hundred and thirty six decisions every day. Science shows us that every time you make a decision, it depletes your mental energy and you only have so much of it. Growing a business is not the easiest thing in the world. Right? So we want to be devoting all of our mental energy to business growth. The way that we do that is by having a trusted system for all of our thoughts. One place we know that when we have an idea, when we think about something that needs to get done, when we need to make a call, we write it down quickly then refocus on what we were doing. When you write it down, it takes the pressure off your brain, you don't have to keep it anymore, you don't have to keep track of it. 

The incomplete system is having multiple systems. EOS gives you one place to put everything in your business. It gives you a place to handle issues and gives you a place to handle your quarterly priorities. It gives you a place to handle accountability. Everything has a spot in EOS. Once you have EOS in place and everybody's solving issues, prioritizing execution, talking about accountability and difficult issues all in the same system, then we start to get into problems where the system for keeping track of EOS is incomplete or in different places, so, you know, with EOS you need to have everybody on the same page, either literally with a piece of paper or virtually. With some sort of system, you need to have a vision traction organizer that has your vision on one side and your plan for achieving the vision on the other. You need a list of tasks. That one list of everybody's priorities so that we make sure we’re executing on those priorities. You need three lists - short term issues, long term issues and a leadership team to-do list. 

We simply don't have the time, the resources or the energy to have anything but straight line progress toward the same goal. What I recommend is that you choose one, trusted software to keep track of your to-do list and everything in between. Whatever software it is, It needs to bring you joy. If you're like me, an idealist, a perfectionist and a person who values your time, I am completely unwilling to deal with bad user interface and bad user experience. There are online tools out there that have awful UX and everything in between and I absolutely refuse to use them. You're more willing to stick to something if you like it and it brings you joy so pick a trusted system that works for you! 

I will leave you with this… Knowing that a great trusted system can bring you so much joy, can make you so much more effective and can help you achieve your goals in such a powerful way, why do you think that smart, creative, visionary people resist the idea of developing their own personal productivity system? They self sabotage by changing - it's perfectionism and idealism. Especially for our visionaries, but also for a number of integrators that I know who, like a lot of good integrators, also have some visionary tendencies. It's “there's always something new and better out there.” Discipline equals freedom, you need to discipline yourself to stick to one trusted system, even if it's only good enough. That's what we entrepreneurs need to do. In this situation, perfectionism is the enemy. Choose one trusted system and stick to it!