---
title: Process Documentation: Getting It Out of Your Head
summary: How to externalize the processes living in your head so your team can follow them.
est_minutes: 6
sort: 1
---

Every problem that keeps coming back in your business has one thing in common.

Nobody wrote down how it was supposed to work.

The client who got the wrong deliverable. The team member who handled the complaint differently than you would have. The onboarding that took twice as long because no one could remember what the sequence was supposed to be.

These are not people problems.

They are documentation problems.

When the way things get done lives only in one person's head, that person becomes the operating system. And an operating system that only one person can access is not a business. It is a dependency.

This module is about the first and most important step in building operational infrastructure.

Getting what you know out of your head and onto a page that someone else can follow.

**Why Documentation Is the Foundation**

Every operational system you will build in this course, the SOPs, the workflows, the quality controls, the accountability structures, all of it sits on top of documentation.

You cannot delegate a process you have never written down. You cannot hold someone accountable for an output you have never defined. You cannot improve a system you have never mapped.

Documentation is not bureaucracy. It is the mechanism by which what you know becomes what your team can do.

And here is the thing most operators get wrong about documentation.

They think it has to be perfect before it is useful.

It does not.

A process written in plain language on a single page is infinitely more useful than a perfect process that exists only in your head.

You are not writing a manual. You are externalizing institutional knowledge. The standard is: can someone else follow this without asking me a question?

That is the bar. Not comprehensive. Not formal. Followable.

**The Process Documentation Framework**

A documented process has four parts.

1. **The trigger.** What starts this process? A new client signs a contract. An invoice goes unpaid for 14 days. A team member submits a request. The trigger defines when this process begins so it runs consistently rather than whenever someone remembers to run it.
2. **The steps.** What happens, in what order, by whom? Write this in plain language. Numbered list. Active verbs. Specific enough that a new team member could execute it without asking a clarifying question. If a step requires a judgment call, write the rule that governs the judgment.
3. **The output.** What does done look like? Every process ends with a defined result. A sent email. A completed form. An updated record. A call scheduled. Without a defined output, done is subjective. And subjective done is how things fall through the cracks.
4. **The owner.** Who is responsible for this process running correctly? One person. Not the team. Not whoever is available. One person who is accountable for the trigger being recognized, the steps being followed, and the output being produced.

Four parts. One page. That is a documented process.

**How to Write an SOP That Gets Followed**

The reason most SOPs go unread is not that people are lazy. It is that most SOPs are written for the writer, not the reader.

They are too long. Too technical. Buried in caveats. Written as if the goal is to cover every possible edge case rather than to help someone do the thing.

A readable SOP has three characteristics.

First: it assumes no prior knowledge of this specific task. Write it for someone who has general competence but has never done this particular thing before.

Second: it uses plain language. If you would not say it out loud in a conversation, do not write it. No jargon, no passive voice, no sentences that require re-reading.

Third: it is short enough to read before executing. If the SOP takes ten minutes to read and the task takes five minutes to do, the SOP will be skipped. Aim for one page. Two at most.

The goal is not a document. The goal is a tool that someone actually uses.

**The Documentation Inventory Audit**

Before you write a single SOP, you need to know what to document first.

Your worksheet for this module is the Documentation Inventory Audit. It gives you the framework for identifying every repeatable process in your business, assessing which ones are currently undocumented or owner-dependent, and prioritizing which ones to capture first based on frequency and operational impact.

The prioritization rule is simple.

Document the processes your team asks you about most often first. These are the questions that come to you because the answer does not exist anywhere else. Every documented answer is one less question on your plate permanently.

After frequency, prioritize by risk. The processes where inconsistency produces the most visible client impact, or the most internal rework, get documented before the processes where inconsistency is low-stakes.

By the end of the audit, you will have a ranked documentation list and a realistic schedule for completing the first five SOPs before the next module.

**Your Action Step**

Run the Documentation Inventory Audit before moving on. The audit tells you what to document. Get what is in your head onto a page. Then we build the architecture around it.
