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Five recurring tasks a growing founder should stop keeping in their head

Memory is a good operating system for a business of one and a poor one for a business of six. These are the five tasks worth writing down first, and what the written version looks like.

A founder's memory is a remarkably good operating system for a business of one. It holds the client's preferences, the renewal dates, the invoice that has not been paid and the thing you promised to send on Friday. It works well until the volume changes, and then it fails quietly. Nothing breaks. Things simply start arriving late and slightly wrong.

The five tasks below are the ones that tend to stay in a founder's head longest, because each of them feels too small to be worth writing down. Each also has a specific failure mode, and in each case a modest written system removes the problem for good.

The five

  1. 01

    Following up after a first conversation

    It fails because the follow-up depends on remembering both the person and the moment, and the moment is usually a week later when you are busy with the work that conversation was competing with. Nothing announces that it has been missed. Instead, keep one list of open conversations with four columns: who they are, what they asked for, what you promised, and the date you will next make contact. Review it at a fixed time once a week. Most of the value sits in the fourth column, because it turns following up from a feeling into a dated task.

  2. 02

    Chasing invoices

    It fails because chasing is uncomfortable, so it drifts, and every week that passes makes the reminder feel more awkward to send. Held in memory, the awkwardness compounds until the debt is old enough to be embarrassing. Instead, keep a payments list showing invoice number, amount, date sent, date due and date chased, with a fixed schedule such as a polite reminder on the due date and a second one seven days later. Write both reminders once and reuse them. When the words are already drafted, most of the discomfort goes away.

  3. 03

    Client preferences and account details

    It fails because you remember the preferences of whoever you spoke to most recently and slowly lose the details of the clients you speak to once a quarter. Asking again is a small cost each time and a visible one in aggregate. Instead, keep one page per client holding the practical facts: who approves work, how they prefer to be contacted, the file formats they want, their internal deadlines, the words they dislike, and anything agreed verbally on a call. Update it at the end of the call rather than at the end of the month.

  4. 04

    Renewals, subscriptions and filing dates

    It fails because these are annual, and memory is poor with anything that recurs less often than it is thought about. A domain, an insurance policy, a filing deadline and a software subscription each come round once a year and each is expensive to miss. Instead, keep a single renewals list with the item, the cost, the date and the notice period, and set a calendar reminder two weeks before each one. The list matters more than the reminders, because it is the only place you can see what the year actually costs you.

  5. 05

    How you do a task you repeat

    It fails because the first time you do something you work it out, and the second time you work most of it out again. Nothing about the process tells you it was already solved. Instead, write a short checklist while you do the task for the second time, rather than from memory afterwards. Five to ten steps is usually enough, and the test is whether someone else could follow it without asking you a question. A task with a checklist can be handed over. A task without one cannot.

The question is not whether you can remember it. It is what happens to the business in the week you cannot.

What a written system actually has to be

None of this needs software. A spreadsheet and a folder of short documents will carry a business a long way, and a system you will actually open beats a better one you will not. Three properties matter more than the tool.

  • There is one place for each thing, and no second place where the same information also lives
  • The place is obvious to anyone who might need it, not only to the person who built it
  • Updating it takes seconds at the moment the information appears, rather than minutes later from memory

The usual objection is that writing these things down is slower than remembering them, and for one person in a quiet month that is true. The comparison worth making is not against your best week. It is against the week when someone is ill, a client escalates and two deadlines land together. That is the week the systems are for, and it is also the week you cannot possibly build them.

Where to start

Start with the one that has already cost you something. If an invoice sat unpaid for two months, start with payments. If a client had to repeat a preference they had already given you, start with client pages. Building all five in one afternoon is the version that gets abandoned, because the habit of updating them is worth more than the templates.

Once the five exist, they become the first things you can hand to somebody else. A business that keeps its recurring work in one person's head cannot delegate, because there is nothing to hand over. Written down, each of these turns into a task with a boundary, which is the point at which growing stops meaning working longer.

More notes

Reading about it is the easy part. Running it is the work.

If this is work you would rather sat with someone else, tell us what you are trying to get done and by when. The reply will be specific about what that would involve.

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