Put more time into your business by assigning repetitive tasks using SweetProcess

In general, I have a rule that if you do the same task three times, it needs to be automated. This is a common guideline which I have heard from many engineers and entrepreneurs over the years. However, some tasks are not well suited for automation, especially when the work crosses different platforms, formats, or requires an additional layer of human eyes for quality assurance. Those tasks need to be defined, documented, and passed onto someone else to perform so you can focus on building your business.

For years, we would write Word documents or use a Wiki to enumerate the steps and outline tasks that need to be done using text with maybe a few screenshots. It was impossible to keep them updated, or even find them when you need them. There was simply no place where team members knew to go to locate our processes.

About six months ago I read a blog post where someone mentioned a service called SweetProcess. The post was just that, a mention – in fact I’m not sure the person even used SweetProcess. But the name caught my eye and I looked into it further, because I needed a sweet process tool. At the time, I was working out a process for a task which took me about 20 minutes to complete and spanned many different computers, platforms, and tools. I spent about an hour building out the process with SweetProcess and included screenshots at each step.

After I completed the process, I showed it to a few colleagues and they were impressed with the ease of use and management of the process pipeline, so we adopted SweetProcess as our primary process documentation platform. Since then, we have created about a dozen processes; many only get used a few times a year, but we know EXACTLY where to find them.

User interface design is absolutely key to a great product, and the team at SweetProcess has done a fantastic job. They have worked out a simple design for editing, easy image and video integration, and step organization. I like to use Jing to insert screenshots and videos, but any screenshot tool would work.

Once a process is defined, you can assign that process to another team member to and they check off each step as it’s completed. As the assigner of the process, you can check in on them and make sure the task is being completed. SweetProcess has a great demo video, check it out.

SweetProcess offers a full trial with some excellent demos, as processes of course. They also have the best support team I have run into in years. I’ve been contacted by support multiple times since we signed up, just to make sure everything was working as planned. After our free trial ended and we signed up, they sent me a thank you card in the mail. Very classy!

As a busy executive or business owner, I bet you have at least ten tasks you could assign to someone else on your team with the proper documentation. If each task takes you 15-20 minutes to complete, you’ll free up hours each week to work on your business, or maybe just go golfing!

I would love to hear about your successes and time-savings using SweetProcess. Please send me a Tweet at @wbushee, or drop me an email. After all, shouldn’t we all define our processes better?

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