One of the most critical elements that a business owner must focus on to drive higher results is to be absolutely fierce in guarding their productivity.
A big reason businesses get into trouble is that business owners do everything apart from what they are supposed to do in their business.
Here is a framework that can help any business owner create more time and higher productivity to achieve higher results in the business.
Productivity hack # 1: Define your role in the business
Most often, when we ask business owners about their exact role in their business, their answer is I do everything.
This means they are involved in all aspects, from marketing & sales to operations & handling customer queries. So basically, they play everybody’s role apart from their own.
The first thing that you need to do to achieve higher productivity is you must define the following:
- What are the responsibilities only you will handle in the business
- What will be the day to day activities that you will perform to drive results in your areas of responsibilities
- How will you measure the outcome of your efforts
We have worked with hundreds and thousands of businesses. And surprisingly, so many business owners operate without clarity about their exact role in their organization.
Clarity leads to productivity. When you get clarity on your areas of responsibility, you will understand what you will not be handling, no matter what.
Productivity hack # 2: Lead your day with a plan
If you look at a day in the life of a small or medium-sized business owner, you will find them constantly firefighting.
Rather than leading their day with a plan or a strategy, they are busy dealing with challenges in their business.
So what do we mean when we say leading your day with a plan?
It is a simple yet powerful process. Before you start your day, you list out critical tasks that you need to take care of in each area of responsibility that you have defined for yourself.
A healthy practice is to list out the areas of responsibilities you have created for yourself and determine the tasks or activities you will perform in each of those areas to ensure that your business results are on track.
This will help you understand the areas you need to focus on and the tasks and activities you need to perform to call that day a highly productive day.
Productivity hack # 3: Create an effective delegation process
Most small and medium-sized business owners have something which we call a perfection syndrome. They involve themselves in every department because they feel they can do these tasks flawlessly compared to their team members.
They do these tasks and activities thinking it is better to do them on their own rather than wasting time and energy trying to make their team understand how to do them.
And in the short run, you might feel like a celebrity. Your team members may praise you. But in the long run, you will make all aspects of your business depend on you.
This means, despite having a team and delegating tasks and activities, you will continue to spend time & effort and wonder why you do not have good people.
So a simple rule is anything that you feel is not under your role and is something that can be done by any other member of your team you must prepare a delegation process and delegate those tasks and activities.
A simple formula that you can use to delegate is
- I do, you see
- We do it together
- You do, I see
Please understand that the more you delegate the mundane tasks of managing the day-to-day activities of your business, the more time you will create to be productive towards growing and scaling your business.
Productivity hack # 4: Build your own capabilities
One area where business owners don’t focus is on building their own capabilities to improve processes in their business, building systems to manage processes, and including technology to reduce efforts in their business.
Only when you are constantly involved in learning how can you improve each and every process of your business and how can you use tools and technologies to reduce certain redundant efforts, you will find out that you have higher levels of productivity, and you will reduce the time required you put in a certain activity or function of your business.
The idea behind building your capability as a business owner is to create idiot-proof systems and processes to make the execution process for your employees as easy as possible. This will effectively save your time, energy, and efforts involved in the tasks and activities and prevent you from micromanaging every small thing they do.
But this can only be done when you are constantly focused on upgrading your own knowledge to achieve higher results.
Conclusion
These are the 4 productivity hacks that, if diligently followed, will propel your productivity levels off the roof.
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