It’s particularly important, when you are a small business owner, to maintain or increase your productivity and efficiency.
This, of course, large boils down to what type of leadership style you have. However, if you are eager to increase your business, you need to find ways to increase your efficiency.
While it may seem challenging at first, it can be done quite consistently, if you know the steps.
That’s why today we’ll look at the 3 most important steps you need to take in order to increase your small business efficiency.
Step 1: Create Your Most Important Tasks (MITs) List
This is important. One common thing that happens at work is that people get swamped by all the work they have to do (both big and small) that they get confused or mix it all up.
At the end of the day, they realize they actually didn’t get much done.
That’s why you need to be organized and create 1-3 MITs, which are your priority tasks. These must be done before anything else, and only once they are finished can you move on to lower-priority tasks.
This means that you can get the important stuff out of the way and really feel like you’ve accomplished something.
Step 2: Adapt to Productivity Cycles
Biologically, we human beings are just not capable of working 8 hours straight. It is not about being lazy or anything like that.
No, instead, we are victims of what’s known as the ultradian rhythm. This is a cycle of naturally high mental energy for about 90 minutes, which drops for roughly 15-20 minutes.
During that low energy period, it is difficult to focus too much on a large task. That’s why a small break is great here.
Not only will it help you to be happier, but it will also refresh you for the next period of high mental energy.
During that dip, you can get coffee or work on some lower-priority tasks.
Step 3: Automate it
Once you’ve got a good thing going at work and you’ve gotten used to the flow and processes, you need to find the areas that you can automate and duplicate.
Specifically, which tasks are being repeated. For example, if you have many questions from your customers about a similar topic, you can create a template to quickly send a reply out.
That way, you can cut your response time down and use that to focus on other things.
Beyond that, are you automating enough? In 2017, there may literally be an automation tool for every single task.
The big ones are social media marketing, email subscription, lead generation, and so many more.
If you can automate and duplicate it, you can become much more efficient at it.
Increase Efficiency by Working Smarter
All these steps above are crucial if you want to really boost your and your small team’s efficiency.
If you follow the steps, not only will your time spent on mundane tasks go down and your efficiency go up, but you’ll also see great increases in your productivity, motivation and enjoyment.
