Quantcast
Channel: business growth – Entrepreneur Blog
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 2

The 3 Factors That are Limiting Your Productivity

0
0

Today I have a special video edition of Ask Evan. One of the most common questions I get asked is: How can I be more productive? There just never seems to be enough time in the day to get everything done. Today we’re going to talk about how you can eliminate, automate, and delegate your work to help you focus on your highest priority tasks, what I like to call CEO tasks.

Getting Started

It’s easy to improve your performance once you start measuring it.

The first thing you need to do is make a list of all the tasks that you do on a regular basis. This means everything from selling to customers, working with suppliers, invoicing, managing your cash flow, etc.

The second step is to bundle all your tasks into common themes. For example, making cold calls, attending networking events, and doing your email campaigns can all be under Sales & Marketing.  Paying your staff, billing your clients, and keeping track of your expenses can all be called Admin. Continue classifying all your tasks until you have 5-7 main categories.

The third step is to figure out how much time you’re spending in each category. For example, you might spend 20 hours per week on Sales & Marketing, 10 hours per week on Admin, and so on.

It’s easy to improve your performance once you start measuring it so make sure you go through this exercise to determine where your time is currently being spent. Once you know how your week is broken up we can work on freeing up your time for the CEO tasks.

From doing this exercise with many entrepreneurs I usually find that the one area we find that we spend too much time on is Admin. I’ve never met an entrepreneur who loves doing the admin side of their business. We tend to want to focus on tasks that we like, we find interesting, and that make us money. Who wants to spend time figuring out your tax calculations?

I’m going to show you how you can Eliminate, Automate and Delegate to reduce your time wearing the Admin hat so you can focus on your business growth. You can use these same steps for any area of your business but I’m going to focus on Admin because it seems to be the biggest area of concern.

Step 1: Eliminate

We tend to do things because that’s how it’s “supposed to be done” or because someone showed us how they do it – but that’s not always the best way. Sometimes the best option is to do nothing!

As business owners, we never seem to have enough time in the day to get everything done and yet other entrepreneurs seem to rocket to superstardom. How does that happen when we all have the same 24 hours? The answer starts with elimination.

Elimination is at the core of every successful business. You have to focus on what you’re really good at, what drives your business forward, and what you’re legally required to do in order to stay in business. Everything else should be eliminated.

Spending too much time on Admin? Look at the tasks you do on a regular basis. Do you actually need to do them? Yes we need to pay our staff, balance our books, invoice customers, etc. But are there other tasks that you’re doing that aren’t absolutely necessary?

We tend to do things because that’s how it’s “supposed to be done” or because someone showed us how they do it – but that’s not always the best way. Sometimes the best option is to do nothing!

He’s an example: I used to take detailed notes at all my meetings and then send a nicely formatted summary of meeting minutes to everyone. It took me almost as much time to create the minutes as it did to be in the meeting but I thought it was a high value add thing to do. After a particularly long meeting I decided not to send the minutes. You know what happened? Nothing. Nobody asked about them.

After swallowing my pride, I realized that most people didn’t even open my minutes and if they did they only took a quick glance at them. They kept their own notes and wrote down what was important to them. How many hours did I waste on these minutes thinking I was providing a high value service when nobody really cared? Too many to count but I don’t do it anymore. I instantly had less admin work and could spend more time growing my business.

Take a look through your list and see what you can eliminate. Just because everyone else does it or because you’ve always done it that way, it doesn’t mean you have to continue doing it.

CEO

Step 2: Automate

If you want to squeeze more hours out of your day without coming into the office any earlier the answer lies in automation.

We’ve already eliminated the non-essential tasks but, if you’re like most entrepreneurs, there are still a lot of tasks left on your Admin to-do list that have to get done. What we’ve got to do here is find you the tools that can get the same quality results (or better) in far less time.

A great example is accounting software. Depending on what study you believe between 65% and 80% of entrepreneurs don’t use accounting software.

That number blows my mind.

Instead entrepreneurs do all their accounting on a spreadsheet or by hand. Want a quick way to boost your productivity and save you hours of frustration? Buy an accounting software package.

For starters check out Simply Accounting. Using this software you can prepare bill payments and invoices, track cash flow, revenue and expenses, track customers and suppliers, automatically calculate government sales taxes, write cheques, and generate reports (it even supports multilingual functions).

How much time do you waste doing any of those tasks when it can all be done easily for you?

My favorite feature is that my bank allows me to download my bank and visa statements directly into the software from their website. No more manually typing in each expense into an Excel spreadsheet – it downloads everything in, categorizes everything for me, and I’m done!  Less time spent on admin and more time to focus on growing my business. I now put everything I possibly can on my Visa instead of paying cash just so that the accounting process is so much easier.

Simply Accounting starts at $69 and it’s one of the best investments you can make into your business.  You can even get a free trial that’s risk-free for 30 day if you want to test it out.

And that’s just one example. Look through all your admin tasks and see what software and tools you can use to make the tasks more automated. You need to raise your standards and value your time properly  if you want to be a successful entrepreneur. Making a $69 purchase is not an expense, it’s an investment into your business to give you better results and free up your time.

Step 3: Delegate

You can gain more hours by leveraging the time of other people – that’s the secret – you don’t have to do everything yourself.

The last step to successful time management for entrepreneurs is to delegate. Even after you’ve eliminated the non-essential tasks and automated other tasks through software tools, you’ll still have some final nagging tasks that need to get done.

What you need to ask yourself is: Am I the best person do to this?

For admin tasks, the answer is usually no. If something takes 5 hours away from your month every month then why not delegate that function so you can focus on your business growth? Yes, it’s an expense but you’re now a CEO and you need to be doing CEO tasks , not admin tasks.

If you only focus on the costs and do everything yourself you’ll always be limited in how much you can grow because you only have so many hours in a day.

You can gain more hours by leveraging the time of other people – that’s the secret – you don’t have to do everything yourself.

Look at your admin task list and see what’s left. Some of them might be things that require a specific skill set. For example, you might hire an accountant or a bookkeeper for some of your financial tasks. Other tasks you might be able to hire a part time worker to help you.

The first person I hired in my first software company worked for 1 hour per day for me on admin tasks. It was boring work that I didn’t enjoy but, more importantly, it also took up an hour of my time away from everything else. I didn’t have the budget to hire someone full time but I could afford one hour per day.

That freedom gave me an extra hour per day to spend growing my business which is exactly what I did. And then I could afford to hire him for more hours to take away even more admin tasks from my plate. You don’t have to start with full time staff.

I’ve had great success by using interns from various colleges and even high schools. I’ve also used odesk.com and elance.com for work that can be done by someone who doesn’t physically have to be in my office. Both are excellent resources and you can hire skilled labor for highly competitive wages – on an hourly basis or contract basis.

Effective delegation is the final step to freeing up your time to focus on the opportunities that are ahead of you and help you reach your full potential as an entrepreneur.

Summary

The order of Eliminate, Automate, Delegate is very important.

Eliminate is first. You don’t want to automate or delegate something that can be eliminated because it’s a non-productive task. Automate is next. You don’t want to delegate something that can be automated because it is more expensive and more prone to error.

Follow the steps I laid out to put your regular tasks into groups and then Eliminate, Automate, and Delegate everything away until you’re working only on the top priority CEO tasks.

It all starts with that first little step.

Thank you for joining me for another edition of Ask Evan. If you liked this video and want to see more please give it a thumbs up below. I’d also love to hear your thoughts if you leave a comment below the video and stay tuned for the next episode!

Readers, what have you done to improve your productivity? Have any simple changes led to dramatic results? I’d love to hear your thoughts if you leave a comment below!


Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 2

Latest Images

Trending Articles





Latest Images