🧠 When the process lives in your head
If you ever want to hand off your tasks to someone else, you’re going to have to tell them how the f you do it. That’s the part that’s both annoying to document AND probably stopping you from trying to hand it off in the first place.
This week I’m sharing some easy tools you can use to document things as you go, before it becomes mission critical.
Whether you already have a team or are hiring your first VA, you should know about these options:
Your Device’s Native Screen Recorder: It may live under Utilities or take some googling to find but odds are your computer, phone, and tablet all have screen recording built in. It may not pick up audio from your microphone, but you can always document what’s happening on your screen without downloading anything else.
Scribe: This app records your screen and automatically generates a step-by-step guide of exactly what you did, with screenshots. You install a browser extension, click record, and then just do the thing you normally do. When you're done, it gives you a formatted document you can edit and share. The free tier covers most basic use cases. It's not magic, but it gets you from "I need to document this someday" to "I have a document" in roughly the time it takes to do the task once.
Loom: This is great for walking through tasks that take more narration, explanation, and context. You record your screen and your voice at the same time. The result is a video that shows someone exactly what you do and why. Loom also auto-transcribes, so there's a text record too.
Otter.ai: This is best when you need to capture an entire conversation of context. If you're onboarding someone, walking a client through something, or explaining a process verbally, Otter transcribes in real time. You end up with a rough but usable document of everything that was said, which you can then edit down into an actual reference. It's not polished output, but it's better than trying to reconstruct a conversation from memory afterward.
How to store everything: I’m always going to say that Notion is still the most flexible option. You can create a simple database where each SOP is its own page, tag them by category (client work, admin, ops, etc.), and link related documents. It can live within the rest of your project management system rather than a random Google Drive folder somewhere.
Try it this week:
Make a loom or just a basic screen recording of something you’re doing often. Creating an invoice, updating a proposal, gathering client analytics, ordering inventory, etc.
Narrate what you’re doing and save the video in a folder. You just made your first SOP.
A note on "good enough"
Something here is much better than nothing. A Loom video with a rough transcript is better than nothing. You can refine it later! Just start!
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