Years ago, I worked with a client who wanted to streamline and automate how clients were onboarded and offboarded (if that is a word). They didn’t have much time to spend with me, so they gave me a copy of the checklist they used so I could get a handle on how it worked.

This checklist would get created whenever a new client signed up, and would travel around the client’s office from one person to the next, with each person doing, then ticking off the task they were responsible for.

If you have something like this (and it might be an electronic ‘checklist’), here’s a useful question to ask yourself:

“Does the next person really need to wait for me to complete my task before they can start theirs?”

If not, they probably shouldn’t be on the same checklist.