Come Up for Air: How Teams Can Leverage Systems and Tools to Stop Drowning in Work

Now that your static knowledge has been captured and optimized for retrieval, it’s time to get into dynamic knowledge. That means process documentation and process management tools.

High-frequency trading also showed me the value of data and making data-driven decisions.

The reason they’re more applicable for processes over, say, a work management tool, is that they include a number of key features unique to processes. Features

The irony is that I used to actually say that “a business can grow only as fast as knowledge can be transferred.” I thought I had it figured out, until I later realized that optimizing solely for the speed of transfer can cause serious issues. What I discovered was that, really, a business can grow only as fast as knowledge can be retrieved.

A thorough planning and work management system will ensure that work is always being done in the right order, by the right person, on time, and without wasted efforts. Imagine that you have systems set up so that each person on the team will know the most important thing they should be doing right now and what they need to do next. It provides acco

everyone’s productivity. Everyone feels like they’re overworked because they’re getting bogged down in daily minutiae, endless distractions, and frustrating inefficiencies instead of focusing their time on the most important work that needs to get done.

A work management tool (also known as a work management platform) is essentially a collaborative to-do list on steroids. These are digital tools that allow you to plan, track, organize, and ultimately complete all the “work” at your organization. Common work management tools as of this writing are Asana, ClickUp, Monday.com, Jira, and more.

Process documentation involves creating detailed, often step-by-step descriptions of how processes are completed from start to finish.

Teams need more than just short-term tactics. They need

Even if you don’t do full-on role rotation, at least schedule some routine process audits to go through your core company processes. Once per year.