“Work the System" by Sam Carpenter Book Summary

If you’re someone who feels overwhelmed by dysfunction and/or multitasking in their work life, your work life is unorganized, you feel that you spend too much of your time putting out fires, or you’re looking for a practical way to get peace of mind at work, this book is for you.

Impressions/personal thoughts

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

My top 3 lessons

Note - I’m writing this in the context of someone working a job rather than running a business that they own. However, the same rules can be applied if you just exchange the word “work” for “business” or “my business” as you keep reading.

Lesson 1: At work, set a team goal

Usually the goal is a team quota, conversion percentage, or some other type of performance metric.

Lesson 2: Whenever I’m doing a difficult or time-consuming task along the way to reaching the goal, make a checklist of the steps it takes to get the task done

For example, in my personal life, if I were making a cake from scratch with no recipe and it turned out good, I would go back and write down the steps I took to make it. Those steps would be super valuable for 2 reasons:

1. If I ever want to come back and make the cake again, I won’t have to start over with figuring out how to do it. I can just look back at my instructions and do it easily.
2. If I ever want someone else to make the cake for me so I don’t have to spend my own time & energy on it, I can give them the steps I wrote down. Then, they’d just have to follow the steps to make the cake.

In the same way, if you were at work and you did something that was difficult or took a lot of time, it would be a great idea to go back and write down the steps you took(kinda like writing down your cake recipe). That way:

1. If you ever have to come back and do the thing again, you can just look at your instructions and do it easily instead of having to start over on figuring it out.
2. If someone else has to do the thing, they can use your instructions and figure it out much easier than they would have on their own.

Tip - If you want to give instructions for how to do something that requires a laptop or phone, use a screen recorder app to record yourself while you demonstrate it.

For things that require a laptop, I use a website called Loom. It lets you record your computer screen and voice while you browse, and then download the video when you’re done. So instead of writing down the instructions, you can just record yourself doing the thing and pass along the video.

Lesson 3: How to cut down the time it takes to get anything done

Step 1 - Write down the all of the steps it takes to get the task done, similar to what’s in Lesson 2 .

Step 2 - Watch this video.

Step 3 - Place each thing on your list from Step 1 in one of the quadrants from the video and either do it, schedule it for later, automate/delegate it, or delete it.

How the book made me better at solving problems

As I go for the team goal and carry out the steps that my teammates and I have written down, I’m gonna come across problems. However, instead of looking at these as problems, I should look at them simply as “a negative result that was produced by a system or process”.

To explain what I mean there, let’s go back to the cake analogy from earlier.

Let’s say that I gave the instructions for my cake to a friend because they wanted to make one for themselves, but the cake they made turned out nasty. In this case:

• The problem or negative result is that the cake tastes not so good.
• The process that produced the cake was the set of instructions I gave my friend.

It would be easy to see that the cake turned out bad(the negative result) and focus on this instead of a solution. Think about all of the times we do this in our daily lives with the negative results, or problems, that we come across.

But instead, the best way to help my friend bake a better cake would be to stop and remember that this is just “a negative result that was produced by a system or process”…

Since the instructions I gave my friend were the process they followed to produce the cake, we could go through the list together and I could ask a few questions like:

• Did you miss any of the steps?
• Did you add anything that wasn’t on the list or make any ingredient substitutions?
• Was there anything that was confusing?
• Is there something I should add or take away from the instructions or recipe?

And eventually, we might figure out what happened to make the cake not turn out so well. From there, we can tweak the instructions or the recipe, and my friend can try it out again. Hopefully the next time it tastes better.

This brings me to the first way this book made me better at solving problems:

#1 - When problems come, don't focus on the result. Instead, focus on fixing the system or process that caused the result.

• When problems come at work(and they always do), don’t spend too much time focusing on the negative result or being upset about it. Instead, stop and think “this is just a negative result that was produced by a system or process”.
• Then, if there’s anything you can do to solve the problem or deal with it right then and there, do it. Otherwise, move on to #2 below.

#2 - How to go about fixing the system or process

Whenever I come across a problem at work that I can’t solve right then and there, I try to always write it down somewhere. Then, at the end of the week, I come back to the list of problems that I’ve written down.

If there’s more than 3 problems, I’ll narrow the list down to the top 3.

1. problem -
2. problem -
3. problem -

From there I’ll pick the #1 biggest problem on the list and use the set of questions below to find a solution for it.

• what is the problem? -
• why is this a problem? -
• what’s the result I need or that I’m looking for? -
• what actions or inactions(only mine) got me to where I am now? -
• what ideas do I have for a solution? -
• how will I get this done? -

Each time I find a solution to one of these problems and apply it, I’m preventing that same problem from happening to me again in the future.

#3 - Make a list of the solutions I find

• After I’ve found the solution, the next step is to write it down somewhere along with instructions so that my teammates and I can apply it later. Tip - try to write your solutions down into 1 to 3 sentence statements. For example, “Stop at stop signs” is one of the basic principles of driving, and it can be expressed in just 4 words.
• As you find more and more solutions to problems, write them down on the same list.
• Eventually, as the list grows, you should be able to look at your solutions and separate them into categories. So if your list has a lot of solutions around talking to customers, then one category would be “talking to customers”.

#4 - Use the solutions I already have to solve new problems faster

From there, whenever I go to solve one of the problems I’ve written down throughout the week, I ask myself “what category does this problem most relate to?”

Then, I just look for the solution(s) that seem most relevant to my current problem. If there’s one on the list I haven’t tried yet, this is probably the answer to the problem.

That’s the end of this summary. In closing, I think it’s important to note that everything in this book can be applied to your personal life. The biggest difference is that you’d be setting a personal goal instead of a team goal. I’ve been using all of these same things in my personal life, and the approach definitely eliminates a lot of stress and worry. I’d recommend it to anyone!