Not enough hours in the day to complete your projects and follow through on your ideas? Here are a few productivity hacks from London executive coach Hans Schumann.
One of the realities of owning a business is that it comes with an endless to-do-list. There are always more tasks to complete, more ideas to pursue and never enough hours in the day. Sounds familiar?
That’s why productivity is a frequent topic that my executive coaching clients bring up:
“Can you help me get more done in my days?”
Yet one of the symptoms of our hectic lives is that, as soon as we free up time at one end, it’s soon taken over by other demands.
I suggest getting rid of the fantasy that you will ever be on top of everything. You will probably never have a clear desk or the luxury of focusing on just one thing at a time. You probably know this already!
So where does this leave you? My approach is to focus on the art of prioritising: becoming smarter about the way you use your limited time and letting go of activities that do not add value to your business.
Here are my top productivity tips to help with this:
Have clear goals and priorities
Productivity is not just about getting more done. It’s about getting the right things done. Those are the tasks that are most effective in supporting your personal and professional goals. I recommend having clear annual, quarterly, monthly and even daily goals. If you have clarity about what they are, you also know what to focus on each and every day. If you don’t have this clarity, you may well find yourself wasting time on activities that seem productive but in reality do little to support your bigger life and business goals.
Apply the 80:20 rule
So you know your goals, but there is still an endless list of actions on any given day that could support them. Where to start? I recommend applying the 80:20 rule, also called the “Pareto Principle”. Vilfredo Pareto was a well-known economist who suggested that, for many events, roughly 80 per cent of the effects come from just 20 per cent of the causes.
For your business this means that of all the activities you do in any given day, it’s likely that 80 per cent of your results come from just 20 per cent of your actions. If you can identify that 20 per cent of actions in your business, you can apply laser focus to the things that really matter.
I do this with the following daily routine: Each evening I writes a to-do list of possible actions for the next day. Once completed, I ask myself: “Which are the top three items on this list that will have the biggest impact on my business goals for this month?”
If you focus on your top three items each and every day, your productivity will sky-rocket for sure.
Start with the big tasks!
You may have seen this puzzle being demonstrated: if you have a pile of large stones and another pile of small pebbles that must all fit into one jug, what’s the best way of fitting everything in? If you start with the small stones, there will not be enough space left to fit in the large ones. However, if you start with the big stones, you will find that the small ones fit easily around and between them. You can watch me demonstrating this in this video “How to get the most out of your day”.
How does this apply to your productivity? Well, the pebbles could be minor activities like email checking, social media browsing, online chatting or those “quick wins” that we sometimes like to get out of the way first, but which don’t have a big impact on our business.
So how do you decide which activities are equivalent to the big stones in your business? They are those activities that are aligned to your primary business goals and fall within the 20 per cent of actions that will have the biggest impact on your business. I suggest tackling them first thing in the morning. Shut yourself off from distractions and hit those actions head on. Maybe they are the ones that you dread most, but once you have completed them you will probably feel an immediate sense of achievement followed by an energy boost.
You can then turn to the less important tasks on your list. If you don’t have enough time left to complete them, that’s OK. You prioritised what’s most important to you.
Touch everything only once
The biggest time-waster in my legal career was “touching” items over and over without doing anything about them; for example, checking emails but deciding to respond to them later; picking up a contract, browsing it for a minute but then putting it back to move to an easier task; or printing out short articles from the internet to read later, although I could have done so on the spot and within minutes.
If you also find yourself touching the same items too often, try a different approach for a few days. Whenever you look at something, deal with it immediately. You either:
- Do it – you complete what is required on the spot
- Ditch it – you decide that you won’t do it at all, not now and not later
- Delegate it – you give it to someone else to deal with
- Delay it – you decide that it’s not effective to do it now, and you schedule it in your diary for another time.
Delegate, delegate and delegate
Speaking of delegation, it’s an essential skill of any business owner or leader. There’s an art to doing it well. To delegate effectively, we need to stop micromanaging so that we free up time for strategic work.
A great productivity exercise is to maintain a diary for one week in which you write down, hour by hour, what activities you spend your time on. At the end of the week you can analyse the data and ask yourself for each activity: Am I the best person to do this? If not, think of people who you can delegate this activity to. Maybe there is someone in your business who would thrive on the opportunity to take over the relevant task or process. Maybe he or she will be even better at it then you, if you just let them learn and grow into their new responsibility.
If you do not have anybody in your organisation to delegate to, you could hire a personal assistant for a few hours each month to help you. Alternatively, you may be able to outsource any processes or even automate them.
Take frequent breaks and have weekends
What? Taking breaks? How is this a productivity hack? You may think that you have no time to take breaks.
I know all about failing to take breaks! In my previous life as a city lawyer, I and my colleagues frequently worked through nights and weekends because “the deal just had to be done”. Yet if we don’t take breaks our productivity will drop, as will our ability to concentrate and perform well.
As counterproductive as it may seem, if we take a solid break or enjoy a relaxing weekend we can calm down, take a step back and return to work with a better mindset and possibly a few new ideas.
There will always be more to do in your business and it’s easy to become overwhelmed by your workload. That’s why it’s important that we establish boundaries and look after our wellbeing, both for the sake of our productivity but also for our own happiness. At the end of the day, you are the most important asset of your business.
Let’s look at YOUR personal effectiveness
Improving your productivity is just one of many routes to increase your personal effectiveness. If you are interested in exploring how to grow as a leader and business owner, you can book a FREE Discover Call or a Trial Coaching Sessions with me or one of my hand picked associate coaches here. We would love to hear from you.