10 Ways to Increase Your Productivity as an Entrepreneur
10 Ways to Increase Your Productivity as an Entrepreneur
How to increase your productivity in 10 simple steps.
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This guide includes:
How to plan your business
How to set up your marketing
How to build your website
And more!
All in a simple goal-oriented format.
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When starting an online business, you often hear one specific phrase: Content is King.
This is a bit of a misunderstanding; I think what should be said is: Productivity is King.
There are so many ways to stretch your content. You can turn a single podcast episode or blog post into several pieces of content and stretch it out without sounding spammy. It takes work, but it triples the efficiency of your time.
You need to figure out how to be productive, not just busy. Getting the most out of your time will be vital for a successful business owner. Time is money, and you can’t just wander around aimlessly, wasting your time.
What’s a trivial task you need to get done? Can we get it out of the way and focus on the essential duties? This will be one truth that doesn’t matter if you are a solopreneur or have a team. Even having a team to delegate to just means you have to stay on top of both your to-dos and theirs.
You’ve got an Empire to build, and you need to get out there and get it!
If you are still planning or building your business, pick up my business planning checklist. It will guide you through each step to starting a perfectly profitable business. Use this checklist to stay laser-focused on each step so you’re not wasting a single second.
Now, let’s stop procrastinating and learn how to be productive while bootstrapping your business from home.
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Your step-by-step guide in a simple goal-oriented format.
Why is productivity important?
Productivity is being able to make more efficient use of your time. It allows you to have more tasks completed and less time wasted. We usually find ourselves incredibly busy. We have a to-do list that is literally miles long, and many of the items on it have nothing to do with making money.
When working from 9 to 5, you can eventually get caught up on your work. You might have a hectic morning, but there is generally a beginning and end to your tasks and scope of responsibilities. At the end of the day, you clock out and go home.
Sure, there is stress. A lot of it! But the business is not yours. Your name is not on that shingle, so all this effort will build someone else’s brand and bulk their pockets.
That doesn’t happen when you own the company. There is always something to do, something to plan, something to launch. Your work is never done.
Even as you read this article, I bet you are balancing ten other tasks in your head. This is the solopreneur struggle. You are juggling a hundred jobs at once, trying to get your business off the ground.
Even if you have a team, you need to stay on top of your to-dos as well as theirs. That’s why productivity is so important. It’s not just about staying busy. It is about actually getting your important tasks done as efficiently as possible.
Busy is not productive, and productive does not necessarily mean running around breathless and frantic. You can still be productive while having 100% control of your time and energy. Let’s dive into our 10 tips for prolific productivity when building your business.
10 Ways to Increase Your Productivity as an Entrepreneur
There are many nuances between actually being productive and just staying busy. When you’re productive, you are moving forward toward completing your goals and getting things done. Making progress ensures that you stay on task and meet the deadlines and milestones essential for the success of your business.
Create a plan every morning that will structure your time and set your priorities for the day. As you incorporate this into your routine, it will become more and more natural until you can implement it into every aspect of your life, optimizing your time. Soon, you will truly become a Productivity Icon!
Start by setting daily, weekly, and monthly goals with focus and intention.
Goals are fundamentally important. I’m not just talking about the goal of becoming a successful entrepreneur or of being named in Forbs. I’m talking about the small goals too.
Let’s start from the top and break them down. Say your goal is to be a wildly successful entrepreneur with a multi-million dollar company. You’ve got to build up to that, and the first thing you need to do is get started.
Let’s take blogging as an example. Four blog posts will be a monthly goal if you want to publish one blog post weekly. We can break that down to a weekly goal of one blog post and then further break that down into daily tasks to write and publish that post.
Your entire business-building journey is going to be like this. Big goals are broken down into increasingly smaller ones. Eventually, each will be broken down until it’s something you can tackle every single day. All these tiny steps contribute to building your way up to seven figures.
These targets are crucial. Without these goals, you will be treading water, not actually getting anywhere. You must clearly define specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-sensitive milestones. Otherwise, they won’t work. Without setting goals to work towards, you are not productive. You are just busy.
Don’t put things off. Start early!
Procrastination will narrow your timeline, cause you to rush, and lower quality and standards. When setting your goals and assigning tasks each day, consider what is due immediately and assess the priority and importance.
I know we want to get things done, but sometimes scheduling a blog post due in a couple of hours trumps folding laundry. Assign your goals a hierarchy of importance. The more critical the task, the higher it should be on your list. For significant projects, start earlier to make sure that you have enough time to make them great.
Regularly review and audit this list. Just because publishing that blog post this afternoon trumps laundry today doesn’t mean we never fold again. As you finish your urgent tasks, regularly review the list and see if the priority of any other tasks has changed.
For example, you may not be in love with social media, but you need to make time in your day to tackle it if that is your marketing strategy. You can publish a thousand blog posts and articles, but you’re talking to an empty room if you don’t market and promote them. While this may not be a task that is urgent to address every day, you still need to consistently find the time to engage with your followers.
Take breaks often, even if they feel unproductive.
I love this one, but it is so counterintuitive. Do NOT burn yourself out and white-knuckle your way through every task. Give yourself a break.
You will be much more productive and make fewer mistakes when you give your brain a break. I like to use something called the Pomodoro Technique. This method allows you to concentrate intensely for 25 minutes, then take a five-minute break between each focus interval. After four focus periods, you get a 20-minute break during which you relax. Then we start all over again.
The entire cycle takes about 2 hours, but you can get a ton of work done. Twenty-five minutes seems like an incredibly short amount of time to accomplish anything, but trust me. This works wonders.
I’m also not necessarily “unproductive” on my five-minute breaks. I’m often doing other quick tasks that also need my attention. I’m also making sure I step away from the work I’m currently focused on.
I usually use the 25 minutes intervals to work on tasks like editing a video, writing an article, or planning an upcoming launch. I then get up and do something more physical in my five-minute breaks. This allows me to walk away from my desk. So, this might be tidying up, folding laundry, making a snack, or jumping in the shower.
By breaking up your work time into sections of intense focus with short spurts of activity, you will reduce the strain on your brain and find you can get more done.
Plan your time and stick to the schedule.
When you plan your time, you can ensure a few things:
You are making the most of your time and not spending it on random tasks that don’t necessarily need to be done.
You can make sure that you have sufficient time for the hierarchy of priorities.
You can generally avoid procrastination if you have an assigned task at a specific time.
You can be intentional about each action and focus your energy on making progress.
It also helps you push through activities you don’t enjoy because you are not necessarily working on them for some unknown amount of time. Even though you know you will not work on a task forever, your brain doesn’t always appreciate these things. Having an endpoint and scheduled break really helps.
If you are working on something with no end in sight, you will get tired of it. You will get discouraged, which will cause you not to want to do it. Even if you are just trying to push through to completion.
By breaking up your day into segments in which you tackle each task, you know that you will be able to do something else soon. So it’ll be a little bit easier to get through that task, especially if it is something that you don’t particularly enjoy.
Chunk your day and ensure you have assigned a specific task for each block. If you have running around to do, give yourself time to commute. If you have obligations that have to be done, give yourself the time to do those too. Be realistic and intentional about these periods, don’t just overpack your schedule.
Breaking up your day and chunking tasks like this can be incredibly productive and motivating. If you run out of time for the allocated task, move on to the next one. You can assign more time the following day or if you finish another job early. You need to follow this schedule and move on when you’re supposed to.
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Increase your focus by turning off distractions.
I love working with old episodes of Grey’s Anatomy playing in the background. That is my comfort watch, and it makes me feel happy when it is on. Even if I am not paying any attention. I practically know every episode by heart anyway.
That being said, I can’t focus or write an article with music playing. It pulls my attention, and I catch myself singing along. It’s messy!
If you know that certain things distract you, turn them off while working. You will be surprised at how much faster you get things done without this noise in the background.
Of course, if you are at home with the kids, you know that not all distractions can be turned off. I can tell you I would have given nearly anything for a quiet button on my two-year-old.
I will be doing an entire series on balancing the priorities of being a mom and building a business. In the meantime, I will give you this piece of advice:
Nap times are golden. Even if you just take that opportunity to sleep yourself. You should give yourself permission to do so and forgive yourself when you need it. They’re also a great time to get intricate work done that requires you to have no interruptions.
Google Home and Siri are your best friends; they will help you so much and break up your day, keeping you on track. If you cannot afford to hire a personal assistant, you have one right there. Use it.
You have dictation software on your phone. It will be one of your most powerful and beneficial programs in this journey. I use it to write the rough draft of nearly all my articles while folding laundry, running errands, or taking walks. Try it out. You can thank me later.
Do not multitask. It will only set you back.
This will be a tough habit for you to break because we often have to juggle so many things simultaneously. Sometimes it seems easier to tackle it all at the same time. But in reality, you are actually slowing yourself down.
Don’t multitask. Instead, pick a project, work on it, cross it off your list, and be done with it. When balancing three and four projects, you are not giving anything your full attention. This will cause you to lose track of your workflow, overlook mistakes, take longer to finish, and reduce the quality of your work.
If you tackle one thing at a time, it might initially seem that you are taking longer. In reality, you finish each project in less time because you can devote your full attention to it.
This results in a better job, increased productivity, and improved quality. Ultimately, you will have to make fewer revisions to get it done sooner. Reducing the number of modifications and corrections and, at the end of the day, shortening the timeline to completion.
If you are a mom on the grind, there will always be a certain amount of multitasking that you are forced to do. However, limiting this habit to only when necessary will help quite a bit.
Write out a to-do list and keep adding to it.
We are all guilty of skipping the to-do lists at one time or another. We have so many things to get done; we think writing all of these down will take too long. Instead, we try remembering all the tasks and pushing through the list.
This is a mistake. Take the time to make your list. It will make it less likely you will forget and overlook something. You can also complete the tasks more efficiently by combining similar jobs.
Check over the list and start by completing tasks that will take you 2-minutes or less. You can knock these out quickly and make yourself confident about your productivity.
Next, group tasks that you can complete with a similar setup and supplies. This way, we can coast through them as well.
This list lets us prioritize our time. Having a strategy for fulfilling your daily obligations will increase productivity and help you get through them faster.
Use your planner.
My planner is my brain outside my body. This is where I keep all my to-do lists, keep track of all my appointments, and schedule my editorial calendars, which are a must-have.
If you’re chunking your time, as I mentioned earlier, your planner is the natural place to keep this. Digital planners are great. Keeping your schedule and chunking your time in Google is also a fantastic option.
I use Google Calendar and my Google Assistant to track my appointments or where I have to be. I use it to calculate my travel time, so the reminders pop up when I need to leave. This is crucial when balancing a family, work, and school, as I did. I also keep a physical planner to hold the more specific details of my day.
Having a physical planner just feels more organic to me. I spend my Sunday afternoons with my planner, filling it in and decorating it to set my mood for the week.
The Planner Community on Instagram is huge and very welcoming. You can find people keeping all kinds of planners and bullet journals. Follow me on Instagram, and you may even get a sneak peek at mine.
I consider decorating my planner as a form of self-care. It brings me joy and is an outlet for my creativity. I also feel relaxed doing it. I get to make my spreads as beautiful and elaborate as I want to, or I can have something simple and cute.
Follow the 2-minute rule to help feel the impact of your efforts.
If a task takes 2 minutes or less, do it now. Don’t put it off. Complete these simple tasks before tackling anything else, especially if they have little or no setup.
These tiny tasks are terrific to get you started and boost your motivation. Nothing inspires productivity like checking things off your to-do list. Motivation can be multiplied exponentially just by seeing progress.
Tackling the tasks that only take a minute or two early will motivate you to cross more items off your list in less time. This will enable you to make measurable progress. It will also get you in the mindset to work, allowing you to coast into difficult jobs with high productivity, increasing your mood and output. Eventually, it will propel you to complete challenging jobs even faster.
You can try it for yourself. On a morning when you wake up feeling blah, try completing three simple tasks right away. My go- tos are:
Shower
Make coffee
Cook a good breakfast
I usually go for something with lots of protein, like cheesy eggs or avocado and eggs. Completing these simple tasks makes me feel accomplished. I have already started working and can now move to more demanding obligations. The shower also makes me feel good about myself, while the protein of the eggs gives me energy.
This simple routine can instantly turn around the worst of mornings.
Tackle your most challenging task first.
A looming sense of dread lasts all day when you have a large or complicated task to finish. This project can darken your morning with nervousness and anxiety until you complete it. Once you start, you may feel ambivalent or lose motivation.
You can solve this quickly by simply completing this task first. Tackle it early and get it out of the way. You will feel less stressed and more productive.
It will also reduce the chance of procrastination. You are more likely to run out of steam and put this task off the longer you push it back. The anxiety will only build the longer you put it off.
These negative feelings will amplify the bigger the task is.
Productivity can be elusive, especially if you have to juggle a full-time job, a family, and building your business. But this simple 10-point productivity checklist will help you climb out of the rut and get more done. It can also help prioritize your tasks, so you optimize your time.
This will get the most value for your time, which is essential when you wear all the hats. Try some of these simple strategies to boost your performance and help get in touch with what truly needs to get done.
If you are in the process of planning or launching your business. Make sure to pick up my free Business Building Checklist. It will help you plan and launch your lucrative online business in a simple, step-wise, goal-oriented fashion. Download it here.
I want to be transparent so that there are no misunderstandings. As an affiliate, I may earn a small commission from any products linked in this post. This is not a sponsored post, and I was not asked to recommend these products. These are products that I genuinely love and want to share with my audience.