One of my top tips for new or veteran business owners is to set up an SOP document for your business. SOP stands for Standard Operating Procedure, but you could call yours whatever you want. This is where you can type out the steps and organize relevant info for all the tasks and processes you do in your business. It can be helpful for any role you are working in — even if you don’t own your own business.

You know when you go to update the banner at the top of your website, but the steps don’t come naturally to you since it’s something you only do a few times a year? Rather than wasting time Googling tutorials and watching bits and pieces of various YouTube videos to get the steps figured out, you could quickly open your SOP document and see the steps laid out for you. If you have an assistant or other team member, it also makes it easy to ask them to update the website and link them over to the steps using a Bookmark, which will take them to that exact spot in the document.

Below is a tutorial video that will show you how I set up and optimize my SOP Document in Google Docs. See below for some of the steps typed out.

Locate Your Document Using Google Chrome Address Bar:

1. Open Google Chrome.
2. Click in the address bar and start typing the name of your document or a keyword from the document’s title (i.e. SOP).
3. If your document exists in your Google Drive, it will show up as one of the top results.
4. Click on it to open it.

Add a Bookmark:

1. Once you ahve some of your steps typed out, you can add a bookmark so it’s easily linkable.
2. Click where you’d like to insert the bookmark.
3. Go up to “Insert” and scroll down to “Bookmark” (near the bottom).
4. Click on the bookmark icon to delete it or copy the URL for sharing.

Turn on Outline View:

1. If you use headers in your document, Docs will automatically create a Outline View that you can toggle on.
2. First, go to View > check Show Outline to enable the Outline View.
3. You can then toggle it on and off using the icon that appears in the left panel.

If you use Google Docs frequently for storing information, you might also enjoy this blog post, “10 Google Doc Features That Will Change Your Life”.