We had a pretty cool moment at Sparkle Studios HQ last week – it was the first time that both Izzy’s YouTube channel and mine had 1 out of 10 videos simultaneously. This might sound fairly innocuous and I’ve spoken a lot about the need to avoid indexing too hard on those fireworks you get in YouTube Studio…but I can’t deny it did feel good to see both videos hitting that milestone 😅 (I’ll leave a link to both videos at the bottom of this email).
Anyway, I wanted to revisit the topic of systems in today’s email. Now, before you stop reading and scroll onto the next email, bear with me. I know I talk about systems a lot so if you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you’re probably thinking “Ali, mate, I get it — systems are important.”
So I’m not going to try to convince you to build systems today. Instead, I want to talk about something that caught me off guard (again 😬) recently. And that’s the idea that systems are not static – if you don’t review and iterate regularly, they can quietly stop being useful, sometimes without you noticing.
Let me provide some context. So the main Quest (the internal name for company OKRs) for the content team this quarter is to go back and re-document everything we do. Every process. Every checklist. Every workflow. From how we prep a YouTube video to how we do competitor research to how we publish a Reel on Instagram. And you’d think, given that we’ve been running this channel for 8+ years and have a team of people working on it, that we’d already have all of this sorted.
And we did. But the problem is that systems and people change over time. New team members join, old processes stop being relevant because the platform changed or the strategy shifted. What started as a clean, simple checklist in Notion slowly becomes an assortment of different approaches from different eras of the channel, created by different producers, each with their own preferences.
And before you know it, nobody’s actually following the system anymore because it doesn’t reflect how the work actually gets done today.
So we made a decision: rather than patching things, we’d go back to basics and ask each channel owner – YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn – to rebuild or review the systems from scratch. Not by copying what was there before, but by documenting what they actually do right now for every piece of content they publish.
We’ve been really intentional about this. When someone on the team writes a checklist for, say, publishing a YouTube video, the question isn’t “what should a YouTube checklist look like?” — it’s “what are the steps that, if you skipped them, would actually hurt the video?”
That sounds obvious, but it’s surprisingly easy to fall into the trap of creating a system or checklist because you feel like you should have one on paper, rather than because it genuinely makes your process better or faster.
A 30-item checklist that nobody follows is actually kinda worse than a 7-item checklist that everyone follows for each video. The goal isn’t comprehensiveness – the goal is usefulness and the system you build has to conform to your ways of working so that it improves the workflows rather than restricts them.
The key thing here is that systems aren’t something you build once and forget. They need to evolve as your process evolves. When I first started on YouTube, my “system” for making a video was basically: come up with an idea, film it, edit it, upload it. That was the whole thing. And it worked, because I was one person making one video a week.
But now we have a team. We have multiple channels. We have sponsors, A/B testing, packaging strategies, and a dozen other things that didn’t exist in the early days. The system that worked in 2018 would be completely useless today.
And the same is probably true for you. If you’ve been creating content for more than six months, the way you work has almost certainly changed – even if the system you’re using hasn’t.
So here’s my challenge for you this week.
Pick one thing you do regularly — it could be making a video, writing a newsletter, posting on social media, whatever — and write down the actual steps you take to do it today. Not what you think the steps should be. What you actually do.
Then look at that list and ask yourself two questions:
1. Is there a step here that I always skip? (If so, either remove it or figure out why you’re skipping it.)
2. Is there a step I always do that isn’t on the list? (If so, add it — because that’s clearly important to your process even if you never formalised it.)
That’s it. That’s the whole exercise. It takes maybe 15 minutes and I genuinely think it’ll make your next piece of content easier to produce.
If you want to take this a step further, systems are literally at the heart of everything that we discuss within the Part-Time YouTuber Academy. Without systems, you’re fighting an uphill battle every week with your content – that feeling of being on a treadmill just gets worse with every upload. So if you’re looking for support (re)building your systems, you can join today here.