10 Top Ways to Become a More Productive Entrepreneur
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10 Top Ways to Become a More Productive Entrepreneur
As an entrepreneur, one common issue you’d have is managing your time. There are so many things to do and achieve in one day, that it becomes overwhelming to do so.
Think about the tons of meetings you have to attend or the tons of calls you have to pick up. Of course, this includes your daily tasks and meeting your goals while still managing your staff.
Although being busy attending to all of this is a sure way to keep your company running, it’ll leave you with a lot of backlogs.
You might also start to experience frequent burnouts signs common among entrepreneurs. So it’s important to understand that being busy shouldn’t be the goal. In fact, by working 40+ hours a week, you can diminish your productivity and returns. It also doesn’t mean that your business will grow.
Being productive, however, allows you to get more stuff done within a shorter period. It’s a winning habit that’ll leave you feeling accomplished at the end of every day.
In this post, we’d be highlighting 10 tips for becoming a more productive entrepreneur.
10 Tips to be More Productive
1. Set your brand up for passive marketing
Your brand is the first encounter any visitor, prospect, or lead will have with your company. This is why it should do a good job of impressing them and generating interest in what you do.
Asides from giving a good impression, your brand will make you stand out from the competition, ensure your business is memorable and make it easy for people to refer their network to your business.
However, to truly have a passive marketing strategy from your branding, you need to first build a solid one. This means investing in a good business name, logo, design, and other consistent elements that’ll convey your brand’s mission.
With this, you don’t have to consistently spend time and resources in competing or building fresh marketing strategies.
Spanx is an example of a billion-dollar company that doesn’t carry out traditional marketing since its launch. This is because of its packaging and branding. Thanks to this passive marketing strategy, they have been able to invest more in production and distribution.
Pro Tips In the early days of your launch, invest in getting a good business name and branding. Be consistent in your brand messaging and positioning. |
2. Have meeting days
As an entrepreneur, you’d be in a lot of meetings – either with your internal team or other stakeholders. Meetings take up a lot of cognitive loads and so there’s not much energy to do actual work.
If these meetings are spread across the week, you’d end up having an unproductive week with extra work to finish.
So instead, dedicate a few days of the week for solely meetings. For example, you can book all your meetings from Monday to Wednesday. If you need to share a calendar invite, ensure it’s only open for those days. Then you can have your Thursdays and Fridays for dealing with actual tasks.
We recommend fixing your work days on the days you’re productive. So, if you’re more productive on Mondays, you should reschedule all your Monday meetings to another day in the week. This will help you be a more productive entrepreneur during the work week.
| Pro Tips Use scheduling tools like Google Calendar that’ll give you a list of all meetings you’d have to attend before the day starts. Always refer people to your calendar to avoid taking on impromptu meetings on productive days. |
3. Utilize your DND mode
Our phones are one of our most effective yet distracting tools. With numerous notifications, messages, and calls coming in, it’s easy to get stuck in there for hours. This is why phone manufacturer’s introduced the Do Not Disturb Mode.
With this feature, you have the opportunity to block out the noise for as long as you want. Apple gadgets even call it the ‘Focus Mode’ which has customizable options for driving, work, sleep, and more.
By turning on your Focus or DND mode for at least two hours every day, you can concentrate on achieving bigger tasks within this window. You can even name this your deep work period.
| Pro Tips Start with the daunting tasks first – by solely concentrating, you can finish them faster. You can ease into DND by starting with smaller hours and gradually increasing them e.g 30 minutes to 45 minutes and so on. |
4. Leverage your power hours instead of traditional hours
While working from 9-5 pm every day might seem ideal, the truth is those may not be your productive hours. As a small business owner, you have to make the most out of your time.
And since one of the reasons you’re working for yourself is to set your standards. Working during traditional hours is a bit restrictive and they might not get anything done.
For example, a night owl might end up procrastinating their tasks until night when they can get a lot more creative. The same goes for people who love to get up at the crack of dawn to work. And so the first step is to understand what type of person you are.
Once you identify what your most productive hours are, focus on making the most of that time. Now, this doesn’t mean calling your employees in the middle of the night. It simply means doing your creative stuff during this period. So if you have to come up with strategies, marketing plans, reviewing accounting reports, etc, do them within this period.
| Pro Tips Ration your coffee intake as a night owl so you’re not entirely drowsy for the whole day. Avoid eating super late too so you can stay healthy. |
5. Create once and reuse
Creating content takes time and if you’re an entrepreneur in a small business, it means you’d have to do it yourself. With the time spent constantly having to come up with content ideas and execute them, there’s little time for other important things like customer service.
That’s why it’s important to work smart. By being strategic with your content creation, you can constantly repurpose them for your other marketing channels.
Start by creating a website or a blog. Ensure that your blog aligns with your business name (preferably a subdomain)
Now create helpful blog posts that contain rich content and provide value. Answer commonly asked questions in your sector. Over time, use the content from your blog posts to create social posts and drive traffic back to your website.
With this, you don’t have to worry about constantly creating content for your different channels. There are also tools like Fluidely Engine that automatically convert your blog posts into social posts like video and Instagram carousels if you want to save extra time.
| Pro Tips Ensure you always resize your blog images for social media. Automate your social media posts with scheduling tools like Hootsuite or Buffer. |
6. Keep a to-do and a done list
Before starting your day or week, curate a list of things you’d want to achieve within that period. We recommend breaking them into small achievable tasks. Most times, you get overwhelmed by the stuff you have to do.
However, putting them down in a list helps you visualize them. Once you complete it, tick it off your list and add them to your done list.
Since you’re likely to beat yourself up when you haven’t finished everything off your to-do list, it’s important to keep a done list. With this list, you’d see how far you’ve come and what you’ve achieved. It also helps encourage you when you’d be feeling low and unproductive.
So start by having a daily planner. You can use the traditional pen and paper journal or use a tool like Trello. Your notes app can also come in handy here.
| Pro Tips Create a different list for different goals – projects, goals, and day-to-day tasks. Keep a realistic amount of tasks on your list so you can easily complete them. |
7. Don’t forget to take breaks
There’s a reason why top organizations offer paid time off in their employment package. This is because breaks are not only essential for your productivity but your mental health as well.
As an entrepreneur, it might be hard to wrap your head around this concept especially because you tend to spend more than 50 hours a week working.
While working for long uninterrupted hours makes you feel like you’re productive, it can have negative performance and long-term effects. However, when you take breaks, you’d grow your company because you come back energized and full of ideas.
When you stay in your work without breaks, you tend to start focusing on ‘how it is’ instead of ‘what could be different’. Creativity tends to happen when you take a step back to rethink your approaches. You’d also be inspired because you have time to remember why you’re doing what you’re doing.
Taking planned and unplanned breaks also help prevent burnout. Research has shown that people who take breaks are more productive than others. So include at least quarterly breaks in your schedule, weekly hangouts, and other activities to help improve your time away from work.
Don’t know how to spend your time off? See how other entrepreneurs are spending theirs.
| Pro Tips Spend time off your gadgets – your screen time will make you feel like you’re still working. Take movement breaks – small 5-minute walks every hour to help your muscles. |
8. Find an accountability partner
An accountability partner is a business friend that holds you to your commitments. If you have preset goals and targets, having this partner helps keep you on track and ensure that you’re productive enough to meet them. Most times, they offer advice on how you can even boost your productivity levels based on their own experiences.
They also offer feedback and ways to improve your business. When validating an idea or launching a new line, your accountability partner can help you identify weaknesses, walk through possible solutions and hold you accountable for implementing those solutions. It’s a two-way street though so sometimes you have to be willing to do the same.
To find this partner in your community so they can thoroughly understand your nuances and other issues better. It’s also helpful to have someone outside your industry who will offer fresh perspectives.
Perhaps the most important thing is finding someone who’d be brutally honest. You don’t need someone who’d try to pamper your emotions or make you feel better. You need someone who will hold you accountable.
| Pro Tips Set clear expectations with your partner. Agree on the consequences of defaulting on your goals. |
9. Make use of productivity tools and software
Today, as an entrepreneur, using productivity tools help streamline day-to-day tasks, like writing, generating reports, tracking progress, and so on. They help improve the quality of your work by making things easier so that you can focus on the more important stuff.
This includes automating presentations, emails, updates, and more. You can also improve your company communications both internally and externally. Once you effectively communicate with your team, they tend to be more productive because they have the access to all information required to make their job seamless.
Productivity tools also helps you to keep track of all team changes, projects, assigned tasks, and more. You’d know who is working on what, the progress, and everything else you need to oversee in your company. They also help remove the creative block you might face while carrying out your daily tasks.
| For example, if you need to register your business and you’re still stuck on getting the right business name, using a business name generator can help you come up with ideas. |
| Pro Tips Don’t be a tool junkie – use only a few tools that’ll keep things organized. Always review the security of the tool you’re choosing so that you don’t compromise company data. |
10. Dump the multi-tasking mentality
Quite similar to not taking breaks, many entrepreneurs pride themselves on being able to juggle multiple tasks and projects at the same time.
Not only does this lead to burnout, but it doesn’t allow you to be at a hundred percent for each deliverable, because you’re not giving it your all. Sometimes, you don’t end up completing any and so you have a ton of unfinished projects in the backlog.
Instead of multitasking, prioritize your tasks so you know what to work on first and last. This will help you meet up with deadlines better.
If you’re not good at prioritizing tasks, there are prioritization techniques to help you start. Some are more complex than others – depending on what you want to prioritize.
Also, it’s important to note that you don’t have to do everything yourself. Spend time delegating instead. If you can afford to hire full-time or contract staff, we recommend doing so. This will help you zoom out of the busy tasks and focus more on the productive tasks.
| Pro Tips Use the Pareto principle to help you prioritize better. Start with tasks that’ll have more impact on your team. |
Bonus Point: Have weekly reviews
Weekly reviews are a great way to track if your improvements are yielding any positive results. For example, if you start using prioritization frameworks or productivity tools over the last month, your weekly check-ins will help you see if there’s been an increase or decrease in productivity.
Since different methods work for different people, measuring your success helps you understand what improves your productivity best. So start by setting clear goals and objectives. What does productivity mean to you?
You can then track it across your team by reviewing those goals and measuring both quantitative productivity along with productivity by profit. So it could be an increase in the number of tasks done and the time to market speed among so many other metrics. Based on the results you get, you can further optimize your strategies and productivity plan.
| Pro Tip Use time tracking and project management software to help you track productivity at a glance |
Conclusion
Your productivity as an entrepreneur not only influences your employee’s morale but also directly affects your company’s growth. And so, it’s important to delegate where necessary, find an accountability partner to keep you in check, and maximize your productivity hours doing high-impact work.
Productivity tools will also help you reduce the busy work and allow you to focus on what matters. This is as long as you keep the number of these tools in moderation. So for example, you can use a business name generator to help you reduce the cognitive load required to pick out the perfect brand name.
As an entrepreneur, one common issue you’d have is managing your time. There are so many things to do and achieve in one day, that it becomes overwhelming to do so.
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