As a business owner, you surely could do with a few extra hours in the day. After all, there’s plenty that you could do during those hours that could help your business grow or give you some extra time to recharge.
Since adding extra hours in the day isn’t possible, you have to find ways to do more with the hours that you do have. This is where increasing your productivity comes in. The critical aspect of being more productive is that you need to realize that it’s not about working harder.
Oftentimes working harder is not practical or even possible. The only option left is to optimize your workday and amplify your impact.
This article will go over six tips to help you get more out of your day without having to work harder or stress out to an unbearable degree.
Make a list of things that you do but shouldn’t
One of the most common productivity pitfalls that business owners suffer from is trying to do too much. This focus on keeping the day-to-day operations on track keeps them from being more productive with the tasks that have the most potential to move the needle for the business.
A technique that helps significantly clarify what tasks you should delegate is to make an inverse to-do list. The traditional to-do list enables you to keep track of all the tasks you have to complete in a given timeframe.
The inverse to-do list’s goal is to help you keep track of all the functions that you should be delegating or merely waiting to get a report on. This practice helps with delegating and preserving your bandwidth for the high-impact decision-making you must do to grow your business.
Implement a focusing technique
As a business owner, your attention inevitably gets divided among all the different aspects of your operations. The problem comes when you need to get actual work done. It becomes increasingly difficult to focus on one work item and make significant progress on it. Some business owners defend this by claiming that they are good at multitasking; however, multitasking is an inefficient way to complete work.
As an alternative, you should experiment with implementing focusing techniques. The idea behind all these techniques is that you provide your undivided attention to one task for a period that allows you to make significant progress on it.
Here are three focusing techniques for you to try:
- The Pomodoro Technique: The Pomodoro technique helps you focus for 25-minute stretches.
- Getting things done: This technique’s goal is to help you complete as many small tasks as possible and break down bigger tasks, so they become more manageable.
- The Eisenhower Method: This is a framework to help you prioritize and classify tasks into urgent and important. This framework is valuable since there will be moments when it’s impossible to complete every task due to limited resources.
Use a VA for personal and business tasks
Having a personal assistant is a great way to free up your time to focus on the most critical tasks. The problem is that for many business owners, having a full-time personal assistant is not a financial possibility. This is where hiring a virtual assistant can be an excellent option to consider.
VAs help you complete many of the same tasks that a traditional assistant would help you with, but gives you the flexibility to hire them on an hourly or as-needed basis. This makes the service much more affordable. Here are five tasks you can outsource to a VA:
- Receptionist duties
- Managing your personal and business calendar
- Checking and responding to emails
- Writing down minutes from meetings
- Vendor and contractor research
Improve team communication
Today we have more ways of communicating and sharing information than ever before. Paradoxically, all these different communication channels can create an overwhelming amount of data that can hurt your productivity. If you’ve ever found yourself wasting 45 minutes going through emails and Slack conversations just to find the information you needed, then you know how time-consuming this can be.
Here are two best practices to keep your team’s communication as efficient as possible:
- Use a project management app: Apps like Asana, Basecamp and Trello help you organize your team’s deliverables and timeframes quickly and efficiently.
- Consider using non-traditional communication: Chats can be an excellent substitute for meetings and are a great way for remote teams to stay in touch. But overusing them can create problems and end up taking time away from work. Asynchronous communication helps you limit the amount of real-time communication so that your team can focus on the tasks they need to get done.
Practice “Just in time learning”
As a business owner, there are likely many challenges and information that you don’t know how to deal with when they’re presented to you. This makes investing time into researching how to solve these problems a necessity. This creates a problem: since you have a limited amount of time, dedicating a large amount of time to research is challenging to do.
Just in time learning is a methodology to make applying what you learn as quickly as possible.
Here are three steps to implement Just In Time Learning:
- Clearly define the problem that you need to solve.
- Gather all the information that you need to learn the skill
- Create action items that you can implement as you learn the skill
Don’t do your accounting
Even if you have a background in finance and accounting, you should avoid doing your own accounting. Your priorities as a business owner and as an “accountant” are very different and can at times be conflicting. For this reason, it’s essential that you get support from a financial professional or team of professionals that can support you with that side of your business.
Final thoughts
As a business owner, you have a considerable amount of responsibility on your shoulders. The best thing you can do to make your life easier is to use every tool and resource to make sure that you are as productive as possible while minimizing how much stress you have to deal with due to your workload. If you’re looking for an accounting partner to help you with your businesses’ financials, please set up a free consultation with one of our experts to discuss how Pasquesi can help you be more productive.