How to Write an SOP: Put the Work You Repeat on One Page

An SOP — a standard operating procedure — is a document that lets anyone do a repeated piece of work in the same order. It’s easy to picture a big organization’s thick binder, but if you work alone, one page is enough. The reader isn’t a colleague. It’s you, a month from now.

If you’ve ever done something for the third time and dug through old messages and files asking “how did I do this last time,” that work is ready to be written down.

When to write it: the second time

The first time, there’s nothing to write. You don’t know the order yet. After the tenth time it’s hard to write, because you’re so used to it that you can no longer see what the steps are.

Writing it while you do it the second time works best. You still remember where you stumbled the first time, and your hands are still moving through the order consciously. Don’t sit at a desk and recall it. Write it alongside the work.

The six boxes on the page

1. What done looks like. What must exist when this is finished. Make it checkable: “the interview recording and a one-page summary are in the folder.”
2. When it starts. What sets this work in motion. “When an interview is scheduled,” “the last Friday of every month.”
3. Materials. What must be in hand before you begin — supplies, tools, a place, people, documents. Include quantities and deadlines.
4. Sequence. The steps, one at a time. This box is the body.
5. When this happens, do that. The points where things usually go off, and what to do then. “If the other person is more than ten minutes late, send one text and cut the questions to five.”
6. Checks before closing. Three or four things to look at before you call it done.

You don’t need to fill all six at once. Box 4 alone is already an SOP. The rest attach as you go.

How to write the sequence

• One action per line, starting with a verb. Not “recording check” but “open the recording app and listen to a ten-second test.”
• Leave out what you already know. If you write down even the things you never get wrong, it gets long, and a long SOP doesn’t get read. Write only what you’ve forgotten before, what you’ve done in the wrong order, and what you had to look up.
• Where judgment is needed, write the standard. Not “let it cool enough” but “until it no longer feels warm on the back of your hand.” A step without a standard changes from person to person and day to day.
• Past ten steps, group them. Three or four chunks — prepare, run, wrap up — let you see where you are.

Example: one customer interview

Box	Content
What done looks like	The recording and a one-page summary are in the interview folder, and a thank-you message has been sent
When it starts	When an interview is scheduled
Materials	Question sheet (3 hypotheses · 8 questions) · recording app · a quiet spot · a thank-you gift card
Sequence	① Day before: read their recent posts and revise two questions ② 10 minutes before: test recording ③ Start: get consent to record ④ During: ask about past behavior, not opinions ⑤ End: ask who else I should talk to ⑥ Within an hour: write the summary
When this happens	Short answers → “Tell me about the last time that happened” · A feature request comes up → write it down, then ask about the situation where they needed it
Checks before closing	Is the recording saved · Does the summary have a result per hypothesis · Was the thank-you sent

Fix the SOP every time you use it

The first version will have mistakes. That’s normal. What matters is fixing one place each time you run it.

• If you did something differently from the SOP, decide afterward which it is — change the SOP, or treat it as a one-off.
• If you forgot something, put it into materials or the sequence right then.
• If there’s a line you’ve never once looked at, delete it.

For looking back on a finished run, the KPT retrospective fits well: the sentences you write under Try are exactly the places to fix in the SOP. To find gaps before you run, a premortem can fill the “when this happens, do that” box.

Common mistakes

• Trying to finish it in one sitting. Spend a day on a perfect document and it becomes too precious to change. Twenty minutes to write and ten rounds of fixing is better.
• Writing everything down. More detail doesn’t make a better SOP. It has to be short enough to read at a glance in the middle of the work, or it won’t be used.
• Keeping it away from where the work happens. An SOP deep in a documents folder doesn’t get opened. It has to open right where you start the work.
• Not fixing it after writing it. When the work changes and the SOP doesn’t, one day you stop trusting it.

How it differs from a checklist

A checklist is a list of things that must not be missed. An SOP is the whole order of the work. As the study of surgical checklists showed — major complications fell by more than a third after they were introduced (Haynes et al., 2009) — things get missed even in work people know well.

You use them together. In the six boxes above, box 3 (materials) and box 6 (checks before closing) are checklists, and box 4 (sequence) connects them. We covered the materials side separately in How to Build a Preparation Checklist.

Keeping the SOP where the work is done

The most common reason an SOP gets abandoned is that the document and the doing live in different places. You open the document, work somewhere else, and have to go back to the document whenever something needs fixing.

In fecit, the app we’re building, the SOP is a template and each run is a task made from that template. The task starts with the template’s tactics, preparation, and steps, and you move through the steps one at a time. “When this happens, do that” goes in Response Rules.

If you’ve already done the work once, the task’s ⋯ menu has “Make Template.” What you change along the way goes back into the template through template improvement, where you pick the changes to keep.

Whatever tool you use, the order is the same. Write it the second time you do it, fill the sequence first, and fix one place every time.