The life of an entrepreneur can feel overwhelming at times. Many successful entrepreneurs, including founders of multi-billion-dollar companies, got to where they are through a combination of unique idea generation and hard work. Naturally, most of us aspire to achieve something similar—even if we can’t hope to replicate that scale.
In life, we are taught to ask the question, “did I get my money’s worth?” Do we ever ask the question, “have I got my time’s worth?” An entrepreneur’s goal is to maximize the impact of every activity they do. To succeed, we must be picking the right things to do and doing them most effectively to have the best impact on our businesses. That means aggressively prioritizing, measuring, and optimizing. If you’ve never measured the ROI of time spent on activities, below are ten of the best productivity hacks to get you doing more faster and maximize personal impact.
Start with a defined schedule
Listing the things to be done in the short term is the first major step in winning the battle of time management. The list suddenly gives a semblance of clarity even if it remains long and overwhelming. This weekly plan acts as a guideline for your daily plan. During the day, break down a week’s mission into daily goals. Any activity that is not directly related to accomplishing any of the week’s objectives has to be scrutinized and removed. You might think that such activities are part of a long-term goal. If so, such an activity should have been part of your weekly list. If something seems important but isn’t urgent, add it to your weekly list for the following week.
Some of the important benefits of creating a schedule include:
- Helps you to manage your time accordingly
- Makes you more proficient and diligent with your time
- Allows you to develop consistency and good habits
- Helps you to create valuable benchmarks
- Minimizes distractions
- Helps you to develop momentum for the working week
- Helps you to stay on track of your goals and tasks
- Holds you accountable
The magic of music
According to one report, 38% of workers are not allowed to listen to music in the office. That could be lower than you expected. Interestingly, the same study has suggested that 79% of employees could improve productivity by trying some tunes at work. This is based on the ‘reasonable listening model’ which suggests music will boost performance, but only to a certain point. As an extra piece of info, researchers also found that pop/chart/folk/indie was the most popular type of music in the office. Your workplace includes the physical space you’re in, the office furniture you use, and the ambient sound around you. It can either be a drag, or a focus-enhancing tool that gives you positive energy.
Whatever the task you’ve set for yourself today, it will get done faster, better, and more creatively if you set the right tone with music. Entrepreneurs wear many hats, particularly at the beginning of a new venture. Sometimes there are repetitive tasks like responding to emails, setting up content on the website, or dealing with invoicing and accounting.
Use Automation and Software When Possible
As a busy entrepreneur, it’s important to slowly evolve your process and workflow to help you become more effective and functional. One way to do this is by using automation software tools that can help you automate cumbersome tasks. Automation software tools are there to help our lives easier and help us to focus on more relevant and important tasks that can take our business and entrepreneur skills to the next level. As a result, you must be consciously aware of certain tasks and processes that suck up your time that can be automated by certain software.
These can include things such as:
- Specific email follow-ups
- Scheduling confirmations
- Call and appointment reminders for clients
- Cancellation reminders
- Invoice reminders
- Bill autopay
Finding Focus: Get More Done in Less Time
When you’ve pushed back starting a side hustle more times than you care to count, and you’re logging more hours than you care to admit, you start to lose confidence. Don’t let this happen to you. The days slip away, turn into weeks, and you’re looking back wondering what happened to all your big plans. As entrepreneurs, we like to move fast and accomplish a lot in a short timeframe. Getting more done with less is seen as one of the greatest qualities of a true entrepreneur. However, there is a very thin line between being aggressive and being unrealistic. If you are the kind of person who creates plans and has rarely met your plan, you are probably setting unrealistic timelines for yourself. When you get to do work that matters, don’t waste the opportunity to beat yourself up for not getting enough done. When you work productively, you can make more progress in less time.
Prioritize Ruthlessly
Prioritizing the most difficult tasks early in the day will set you up for success. As a busy entrepreneur, you should strive to make your days get progressively easier, not the other way around. It also prevents you from creating harmful procrastination habits that can be detrimental to you. As for missing out on the opportunity to try new things, evaluate if it is truly an opportunity or just a distraction in disguise. A little bit of planning would tell you whether something is worth trying at all. Focus is key to accomplishing objectives and the ability to say no is the first step towards staying focused.
Keep Distractions to a Minimum
It’s incredibly easy to get distracted, especially when you’re checking your phone every five minutes for texts, e-mails, and social media notifications. So how can you avoid those time-consuming distractions throughout the day? When it comes to emails, try to check them while on the go. Instead of just standing there doing nothing while waiting for your coffee in the morning, for example, you could be going through and responding to some messages. Your ability to handle multiple things at once and do a good job is very limited. As much as you think you can multitask successfully, certain components of your work and day will suffer if you fail to focus on important tasks without distractions. Giving all your attention helps you to retain important information and remember details that can help you stay consistent and reliable. Doing less at once will help you do more in the future.
Take Small Frequent Breaks
Burnout is a very common reality for many busy entrepreneurs and many fail to realize when they are heading towards burnout. This is more serious than people realize because it can impact the quality of your work, the relationships with the people around you, your mental and physical being and so much more. It’s important to take small periodic breaks through your workday and also your workweek to simply hit the reset button and recharge your batteries. If you notice that you have been aggressively working on one specific task for 2-3 hours, chances are you have exerted a good amount of your energy.
Get the Right Amount Sleep
Getting more sleep is one of those things that everyone talks about to find focus. It’s also the one that I’ve fought against most, and the one that is the most nuanced. But there is no denying that sleep improves creativity – and business is a creative venture. Sometimes you are most productive in the morning, other times in the evening, and sometimes you can accomplish amazing things from midnight until three or four in the morning. It’s your job to pay attention to your ebbs and flows and use them to your advantage. Just because someone else loves waking up at dawn and getting to work doesn’t mean you have to do the same thing. Always take proper sleep for getting more effective and efficient.
The perfect presentation is overrated
It’s natural to want everything to be exactly right, particularly when you’re putting together a presentation. Unfortunately, this does mean a lot of time is wasted in the planning stages. It’s also possible that the devil isn’t really in the details. Client surveys suggest that instead, engagement increases with a few imperfections and a presentation that showcases more authenticity and personality. Any great presentation is about serving the audience, rather than how good the presenter appears to be. But don’t forget that the interaction, rapport, and energy you create have a disproportionately positive effect that means people will remember you and your presentation for all the right reasons.
Follow the Totem Pole
- First, Email
- Next, Phone/Web Call
- Last, In-Person Meeting
We get a lot of meeting requests. Make no mistake that meetings are the biggest time killers, especially factoring in the travel time for external meetings. You attend four such meetings in a day and suddenly your day disappears into thin air. The better question is do you need all the meetings? Following the communication totem pole will help reduce meetings and save a lot of time. Start at the top of the totem pole and move to the bottom when you schedule meetings. In other words, if you cannot address a request through emails, schedule a phone call or web meeting using Skype or your favorite calling method.
To conclude
By managing your energy this way, you’ll notice that you’ll be more productive because working in 90 minutes bursts keeps us feeling refreshed and energetic. Just keep in mind that your energy management is more effective if you get enough sleep at night–despite the misconception that entrepreneurs never sleep.
