Building Systems The Lazy Way — The Problems (Progress not Perfection)

“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” James Clear, Atomic Habits.

Importance of Systems

We all have systems, whether they are intentionally built or not. If they’re not intentionally built then quite often we are working against them or they are providing us with negative results.

So building systems is important, especially in the realm of any kind of productivity.

If you don’t take control of your systems they will take control of you. You can’t improve anything without first either improving your systems or dismantling the ones that are negatively impacting you. Most often it is a combination of both.

Beware of Dragons

The dragons in systems building are perfection and procrastination.

The time you spend working on your systems is time you’re not using on actually doing anything productive. Even if that means working on something in the most manual and tedious way possible. That’s infinitely more efficient than the time spent of a system that’s not yet implemented and active.

Designing and building systems can become an enjoyable hobby in itself. Especially if it revolves around specific tools or approaches such as automation tools or programming your own solutions.

This is where the second dragon of procrastination comes in, it’s doubly dangerous as you may find yourself justifying it as being productive since it will be a productive system.

In the next essay I’ll go over how to approach slaying these dragons.

Read this post and more on my Typeshare Social Blog