As an entrepreneur, being productive can be highly crucial to the survival of your business. Many people confuse being busy with being productive, but it is not. You can be busy without being productive and you can be productive without being busy. It’s all about how you manage your day’s schedule and how you prioritize the various tasks you have to do.
In order to maximize your productivity you have to clearly define it first of all. What makes it a productive day? Is it tied to the sort of revenue you make? Is it tied to the number of leads that you can generate? Does it depend on the marketing calls? You have to clearly define what a productive day would be and then every bit of energy you expend must be targeted towards that objective. Here are a few things you can do to make your day super productive as an entrepreneur.
Have a clear vision of productivity
I have already introduced the subject in the second paragraph. If you think that you’re busy your entire day but still by the end of the day you don’t feel very productive, you need to define the parameters of productivity. Write them down somewhere. They don’t have to be the same every day. Being productive means achieving what you have wanted to achieve for that particular day, even if it was replenishing your office supplies for the month.
Automate repetitive tasks
There are many repetitive tasks that you can automate, especially if those tasks are carried out on your computer. Even if you have to spend some money getting the program or the batch file developed, get it done ASAP. Suppose you’re spending half an hour everyday doing something routine that you always have to do. It is critical for your business, but it is pretty much the same stuff. What if that task can be automated? If you have to work in Excel you can get some macro developed that can take care of that task as soon as a worksheet is loaded. If you have to send multiple emails every morning containing more or less the same text, you can create canned responses and use them to speed up your work. You can apply similar methods to automate other repetitive tasks.
Don’t spend time doing stuff that others can do
Although money saved is money earned this is not the way you want your business to make money – by saving it. You want your business to make money so that you can spend more money on growing it. Hire people with specialized skills. If you don’t want to employ full-time professionals, you can outsource your work to freelancers who can do the job better than you can do. Even if you know programming, even if you know how to tweak images, if these are not your primary professions, don’t spend your time doing them. Assign these tasks to someone who specifically does them so that you can focus on growing your business, or at least doing what you are being paid for. This way you will be spending more time doing productive work rather than producing work for someone else.