# What goes into a hat, and why a folder of files falls short [Home](https://theonlyaxelj.com/en) › [Study](https://theonlyaxelj.com/en/study) › [Articles](https://theonlyaxelj.com/en/study/articles) author: [Axel Jedlitschka](https://theonlyaxelj.com/en/about) published: 2026-10-13 updated: 2026-10-13 language: en reading time: 5 min topic: Organization source booklet: [Your Hat](https://theonlyaxelj.com/en/shop/introduction/your-hat) A hat has three written parts and a fourth, the person who went through them, and without that person the first three are only stationery. A hat, meaning everything someone else needs to fill a role without you, is more than a file. It has three written parts, and a fourth part without which the rest is worth very little. The word hat carries two meanings. One is the role itself, such as whoever holds the front desk. The other is the file that teaches the role: the pages, the explanations and the materials. When the booklet says to write a hat, it means the file, and this article is about what goes into it. ## Three parts, and a fourth The first part is a write-up: a page that explains in words what the role involves. Whoever held the role before usually writes it, and it counts as advice rather than law. The second is a checksheet, a short list of what the person has to know, read or practise before doing the work. The third is the hat pack, the materials themselves: documents, links and recordings. In a small business it is one folder, and no archive is needed. The fourth part is the person who was trained on the other three. **Three files in a folder that nobody has been taken through do not make a hat.** The booklet calls them stationery. Suppose a salon owner. Her write-up is a page about the front desk. Her checksheet is four short lines, and one of them is knowing the diary. Her hat pack is a single folder in the cloud with the price list and the wording of the reminder. ## Who writes the write-up Here is some relief. The write-up does not have to come from you. Whoever does the job today usually describes it best, and you can simply ask them. When there is nobody to ask, start with the simplest thing you have. Suppose a physiotherapist whose receptionist has left. She recorded a voice note to herself while driving, covering everything the receptionist would do on an ordinary day, and she transcribed it that evening. That was her first write-up, and it was enough. ## The product and the number sit inside the hat The source lists nine items that a full hat must contain. Two of them are surprising: the product of the post and its statistic, which is the number counted every week, are items inside the hat. In practice, what the role produces and how you know it happened have to be written physically into the document, and cannot live only in the head of whoever wrote it. A product is the thing that comes out of the role at the end, in a state you can pass on. A statistic is a single number you count weekly to show how much of the product came out. When both are missing, the person knows what to do and cannot tell when they are done. Suppose an employee handed a long service procedure that names no product and no number. He could recite parts of it and still not know when he had finished. Some of the nine items were designed for an organisation with hundreds of staff. The booklet cuts them down to the six fields that survive in a small business. What stayed out stayed out deliberately: a formal organising board, four levels of statistic and a full archive of materials. Those solve the problems of a large organisation and only weigh a small business down. Suppose a café owner who filled in the six fields for the bar position, needing only half a page, then printed the page and hung it behind the counter. Or a studio with two partners who filled them in twice, once for taking in enquiries and once for production, and the boundary between the two roles stopped being an argument. ## The hat everyone wears Besides the hat for each post, one page is needed by everyone who works in the business, whatever their role. The source lists seven items, and every one of them suits a small business unchanged. They answer what a new employee asks in the first week, about the business, the terms and how people work together. That page removes most of the questions of a first week. It is identical for everyone, so you write it once. Suppose a café where every new hire asked the same thing: what to do when a customer complains about the coffee. Once the answer went onto the team page, nobody asked again. Or a garage where a single item on that page, the one that says what counts as urgent, ended the phone calls to the owner on Saturdays. Or a freelance designer who wrote such a page for herself while she still worked alone, with her working principles, her pricing method and her red lines. When she took on her first subcontractor, that page was his onboarding. The booklet gives this chapter two short exercises, both about building, and it lists the six fields and the seven items in full. In the practice section at the end there is also one called apply. A hat that works is a folder together with a person who went through it, and who knows what comes out of the role and how it is counted. - [Your Hat](https://theonlyaxelj.com/en/shop/introduction/your-hat): A way to turn a role into something that can be handed over, and a check that tells you whether it actually landed. --- [עברית](https://theonlyaxelj.com/he/study/articles/what-a-hat-is-made-of) · [Español](https://theonlyaxelj.com/es/study/articles/what-a-hat-is-made-of)