Tips to Increase Your Business Productivity
Whether you’re a stay-at-home mum or a corporate high-flyer, possessing excellent time management skills is vital — and never more than for people running their own business. Making the best use of your time is the key to increasing your productivity and your profits and we include this in our Monitor and Manage Small Business Operations Subject.
Are You Spending Time Making Money?
If you are spending too much of your time dealing with tasks that aren’t revenue generating, you’re being unproductive and not managing your time as well as you might. In the case of a house painter, managing the accounts is not revenue generating; certainly getting paid on time is an important aspect of running a successful business, but it’s not why Jan Smith employed you — she employed you to paint her house.
Structure and Routine: Brings Success
The first step towards efficient time management, and in turn, greater productivity, is working out how long certain activities take to complete and then setting aside certain days of the week, fortnight or month to complete them. Yes, you need to add some structure to your business; you need a routine.
For creative types or people that left the corporate world with the express desire to throw routine to the wind, the very idea of adhering to a routine in their own business is probably anathema. But the difference between a successful business and an unsuccessful business is structure. Structure guarantees that a given task will be completed by a certain time, each and every time.
This doesn’t mean your entire business needs to be structured to within an inch of its life — just those tasks you acquired when you went into business for yourself. For an architect this could mean setting Tuesdays aside to manage the accounts, for instance.
Even if you have never been great at time management, it’s a skill you can easily learn and develop. Perhaps start by downloading a time management app from the App Store — of which they are abundant — and start tracking your daily activities to see your productivity.
Through efficient time management, you’ll not only increase your productivity, but your profits, too — watching the clock has never been so productive!
