Every minute of your day counts as a business owner.
With endless “to-do lists” on your plate and limited time each day, it’s extremely crucial that you find ways to work smarter and not harder. Because if your productivity is low, it will be tough to grow your customer base and stay competitive in the market.
But the good news is, in today’s age, new technologies and tools are available. This means that remote working is possible. There are plenty of productivity hacks that you can utilise to streamline your workflow, maximise your time, and bring back balance to your life.
Let’s look at some of these productivity techniques to help you get more things done in less time.
Make Your Days As Efficient As Possible: Productivity Hacks You Should Know
Plan Your Day Ahead of Time
The first step to being productive is to plan and create your schedule and to-do lists in advance. You should know what tasks are on your plate and their corresponding deadlines. Doing so will help you stay organised and more focused. You can also avoid feeling overwhelmed and stressed when completing your tasks. Additionally, knowing your next steps will eliminate all guesswork and wasted time.
You could write your plan or list early in the morning or much better the night before you sleep.
Prioritise Your Tasks
A lot of day-to-day, weekly, monthly, and yearly tasks will keep you busy—it’s a reality. That’s why you have to know how to prioritise well.
Look through your lists and determine the most important tasks that are relevant to your daily operations. Check the urgent ones that require immediate action. To illustrate, you could create a separate list for your long-term projects, so they don’t engulf or divert you with those more urgent items that should go at the top.
By prioritising your tasks, you can ensure that you are focusing on the right areas to amplify your business results.
Some examples of time and project management tools that can help are Asana, Trello, Notion, Trello, Monday.com, and Google Calendar.
Determine What Your Team Is Good At and Delegate
Some of the most successful business people know they can’t do everything independently. So, don’t hesitate to delegate and assign tasks to your employees. You can also always seek outsourcing help from domain experts when needed.
With that said, before you assign tasks to your team, you must consider first their interests, expertise, workload, and time availability.
All in all, the delegation will help increase your business productivity and efficiency. It can enable you to free up your time so you can concentrate on the more significant aspects of running your small business.
Automate Processes Where You Can
Some mundane and repetitive tasks like email marketing are crucial to the functioning of your business. However, they’re taking up a great deal of time that could slow down your workflow.
Investing in new technologies such as AI-powered tools and Cloud and Automation software can alleviate your business architecture. This can maximise your time and money and strengthen your business productivity.
For example, an accounting and financial management app, Moolamore, has convenient automation and integration features that can help streamline the financial operations of your business. It is a must-have if you want to eliminate errors, guesswork and complexity in handling your business finances.
Tap Into the Power of Data to Make Smarter Decisions
Measuring your data gives you the power to understand better how your business is performing and identify areas for improvement. In addition, it can help you learn about market trends and how your customers are behaving. These insights can help you make smarter decisions and develop the best business ideas and strategies accordingly.
If you know how well you’re doing, it’s easier to think of effective techniques, plan solutions and take action.
Avoid Unproductive Meetings
Be smart about meetings. Use it as a strategic tool to save time and boost efficiency. This means setting meetings when you have a clear agenda and cancelling the long-winded and unproductive ones. Likewise, every meeting session must not only have a purpose but should also follow a strict schedule.
Indeed! Meetings are essential to keep your team on track and make your clients happy, but they can also be huge time wasters if not implemented wisely.
Eliminate Possible Distractions
Distraction is one of the most common productivity stealers.
Noise, mobile notifications, and social media are just a few examples. To avoid this, consider eliminating possible distractions in your environment and discipline yourself to focus and take the necessary measures.
Log off your personal social media accounts and other means of interest. Turn off your phone notifications and dedicate a few long hours to deep work. Believe it or not, you will feel accomplished in the end.
Select the Right Soundtrack
Throughout the years, many studies have shown how music can significantly affect the mood and productivity of a person. Some of these include the so-called “Mozart Effect“, which states that listening to classical music can increase our spatial reasoning skills and ability to think long-term. On the other hand, another study by the American Medical Association revealed that surgeons become more skilled and systematic when they listen to the music they like.
As you can see, these studies all boil down to one point where, no matter what music taste or genre, listening to music has always influenced people’s state of mind and capability. So, don’t be ashamed to put on your headphones and pick your favourite song or soundtrack that you think is helping you to get your work done.
Get Enough Rest: Manage Your Energy
We have to accept the fact that despite our best efforts, our energy levels just don’t remain constant throughout the day. Ebbing and flowing between mental productivity and rest happens all the time. We are not superheroes who possess immortal strength.
In fact, according to studies, just one night of sleep loss will impair our innovative thinking and flexible decision-making, and two days will lead to a whopping 300% reduction in our attentiveness and ability to react. This only proves that if people don’t get enough sleep, they tend to work slower, and easy tasks seem much harder.
So, always take the necessary breaks to increase your work productivity. There are many options to spend your downtime. Some could be sleeping, eating a healthy snack, or exercising. Others could be meditating and doing a skincare routine. Whatever it is, what’s important is the activity that can help restore your energy and get you back to your healthy point.
Conclusion
No need to drown yourself in too much caffeine or deprive yourself of sleep, all in the name of getting things done. By implementing the different productivity hacks listed above, you’ll be surprised at how making significant small changes to your lifestyle and habits can help secure big wins for your small business start-up!
Drive productivity into your business. Choose Moolamore! It’s an ultimate cash flow tool that can simplify the tedious and complex work of managing your business finances so you can make the most of your time productively. Request a free demo now!
