Building Systems The Lazy Way — Copying

Why Copy

Copying is a shortcut that can be used in many areas of productivity and life. This isn’t about stealing people’s work but about using what others have learned before you. Think of it more as standing on the shoulders of giants and not reinventing the wheel.

This is actively encouraged in many areas such as galleries of automation templates with online automation tools. Even in programming the most common task is to reference documentation or Google search solutions and implement things to address your problem from these previous or example solutions.

It also doesn’t have to mean copying exactly, as we are all unique in both ourselves and exact circumstances, requirements and our journeys. You can think of it as assembling premachines pieces to make the system you want.

Do What Others Do

In figuring out systems to copy you need to find examples of people or places that have the same outcomes that you are trying to achieve.

In this way it may not even be a formal system but simply replicating what you see others doing to achieve that outcome and reverse engineering it to apply to yourself and your own systems. This isn’t necessarily copying and pasting but the actual system design and guesswork of heading in the right direction is take care of.

You may even chain together different systems to create a path by not only looking at someone’s outcomes and history but maybe different people at different levels or outcomes that you need to reach before the next.

Some of this will be explained in the essay on traps in copying systems.

Read this post and more on my Typeshare Social Blog