One thing Clay always teaches as a business coach is the fact that you have to document everything or you will lose your mind. Documenting everything from your passwords, images, videos, legal files, and marketing pieces should be mandatory in every business and in everybody’s life. Everyone has experienced the consequences of this at least once. It’s the classic case of, “I swear I scratched that password down on one of these sticky notes!” If you don’t save your documents, you will find yourself in the constant doom loop of wasting time, resetting passwords every day, and disorganization.
Life is too short to look for passwords or to recreate them every day
We all know we should do it but the majority of people simply don’t save their passwords in a safe place. This is one of the biggest time wasters I have ever come across as a business coach because it becomes a daily occurrence of resetting and forgetting your passwords. You must save all of your passwords onto one text-based document, save that as a file, and save that file to a storage system like Dropbox. Life is too short to look for passwords or to recreate them every day. Stop wasting your life away by searching for passwords and start documenting them.
Whether it is images, videos, podcasts, articles, or print pieces, you have to learn to document your file and save it. I have had the misfortune of watching someone spend hours on a print piece or a systems/checklist document to later lose it because it was not saved properly. When you’re done with it, don’t risk it! Save it!
Saving legal documents can be one of the most important things you do. Whether you are documenting write-ups, lease agreements, or hiring someone, saving the legal files can make a world of difference. If you write an employee up and get to the point to where you need to fire, you can pull up your Dropbox account, grab the write-ups, and have proof. If you don’t save them in a place that makes sense, everything instantly becomes a “he said she said”. If you don’t document it, the document doesn’t exist.
You have to document your numbers. You have to track the numbers of customers you have, leads you got, conversions that were made, and anything else that you care about. We have to track these things but more importantly, we have to keep these tracking sheets in a place where we can find them. We have to save them in the same spot, that makes sense, every time.
All of these are very important but it all means nothing if you don’t have effective and consistent naming procedures. If you save a file but leave it named “1283_727JPEG” then you and your business coach team will never be able to find it. You have to choose a file naming system that works for you and stick to it. Everyone has to use the same system every time or none of it works. Don’t waste any more time searching for documents when you don’t need to. Do it right the first time.
