Run-Book(s), Control Journal(s), and Tracking Information for Systems

A system's "Run-Book" is one place that your& system can gather procedures, lists, cheatsheets, indexes, welcome guides for new system members, and orientation materials so that your& life operates more smoothly. How detailed it needs to be will depend on system communication, shared memory, what skills your& life requires, how scattered your information and projects are, etc.

Y'all can have several Run-Books, such as the Flylady.net idea above for a household maintenance journal (Flylady has a bunch of other ideas here, but she's not plural). However for a very large system with low information sharing there should probably be a main/master run-book with orientation materials, a welcome message at the front, an index or table of contents so information can be found easily, and at least one tab dedicated to where to find pertinent info — this is where it might be pointed out that there's a household control journal, what types of information it contains, where it's usually kept, and what it looks like.

We Crisses have several Run-Books, and keep various cheatsheets for how to do certain tasks in some of them, especially for things like our server maintenance which may be things we do only 1 time a year so we would forget how. Another example is we have an EFT cheatsheet kept in a self-work binder along with our system safety plan materials. We have a huge recipe 3-ring binder just for meal prep stuff. We have a system binder where we keep our vision statements, long-range plans, inspirational stuff, our system kids' adoption papers, etc. We have smaller kraft-paper notebooks & composition notebooks with specific topics such as podcast ideas, t-shirt ideas, workshop ideas, trauma narratives (called our "Twitch" notebook and warnings on the cover). And we also have an electronic KMS (knowledge management system) in the form of a wiki (see MultiJournal New) where we can also log internal meetings that aren't done on paper, track links, have endless topics of interest, brainstorm about course curriculums, etc.

One thing we've found is that we prefer project-based or themed run-books rather than a "one run-book to rule them all" approach. The teams in our system who work on certain projects have their methods for tracking things, whether electronic or physical, and it works for them. As a whole system, we don't interfere with what's working for us. So if y'all feel that your "system's systems" are disorganized, consider something to wrap around the methods already in place so that you don't disturb those who are working on projects. You might be more organized than it looks like.

But having system agreements about say putting things back where one found them is also important. We have one space we keep all our kraft-covered notebooks but our composition notebooks tend to get scattered around our apartment, and we're often scrambling to find them. So work on taming the sense of disorganization within the organization by getting folk to agree to keep things in a specific place so that other team members can find them — and make sure that they're labeled clearly and that teams working on things together have agreements about how to use their shared run-books.

Also — we've often had someone who had their pet idea and their pet notebook or journal to go with the idea and the idea often stalled out and wasn't picked up again. When possible, try to work in teams on projects so that the projects get more momentum and are less likely to be abandoned. Progress notes, and what the next steps are in a project can be kept in the associated run-book.

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