You might think that increasing the pace and output of your business’ operations will require some sleek technique you’ve never heard of. And perhaps you have already wondered about the big sums of money you’ll have to spend to make this happen.
But what if you only need a couple of simple hacks to boost your productivity on the job? For example, you may push your sales numbers up by changing from your current delivery service partner to one that’s more efficient, so that your customers’ orders get to them on time. This could in turn boost your business’s reputation, and increase sales in the long run.
Here are a number of straightforward hacks you could implement today to make things happen faster at your business.
1. Write Down Your Tasks for Tomorrow Today
If you already use a to-do list, you’re probably already achieving more in a day than most other persons in your situation have managed without one.
But how about preparing your list the day before you’re supposed to start ticking items off it?
If you currently note your tasks just before you begin with them, you’ll notice that the process of jotting them down will take you a while. It’s also possible that you may be so pressed to get started with the day’s activity that you omit some important items from the list.
You can avoid this error by writing the to-do list the day before it’ll be used, preferably at the end of that (the previous) day’s work. Include tasks you were unable to complete the day before, if extra work has to be done.
2. Rank Priorities and Attend to Them Accordingly
Try to tackle the most pressing tasks first. ‘Pressing’ could mean ‘urgent’ or ‘important’, or both. A lot of factors will determine what makes the ‘urgent and important’ portion of your to-do list: deadlines and expected gains are two that readily come to mind. In the end, it’s up to you to decide what’s more valuable and worthy of your limited time.
3. Deal with One Project at a Time
Contrary to popular perception, multitasking often results in lower productivity. It turns out that focusing your time and energies on one thing at a time can help you do quality work across the different tasks you will attend to.
Some prefer to devote short spurts of time to different tasks, because it reduces the monotony of their daily routines. While this may be a good idea in a few instances, it could drain one’s mental energies pretty quickly. That’s because the mind has to exert itself more as it moves quickly between different kinds of activities in a short while.
4. Use Templates
How about all that time you spend trying to compose the perfect email or social media post? You can slash it by creating templates to use for your communication and marketing content.
An email template is a format that you can follow when writing an email. With it, you don’t have to worry about the layout and order of the content you’re sending out. Just plug in the right words and sentences for the context, and you’re good to go. The same process applies with other content for which you can design a template, like social media, web content, product quotes, reports, etc.
5. Automate Your Processes
There are a lot of activities that you can set up to work without your intervention. For example, you can use content scheduling apps to schedule the automatic publication of your content on social media platforms at the times you choose.
There’s more on automating business processes here.
Rounding Up
There are a lot of simple things you could do to minimize time wasting and produce a lot more on any given day. We’ve shared five here. Adapt them to your specific situation, and watch your business yield more positive results.
Featured image source: Women in Business
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Thanks Ikenna. The piece is pretty rich in content, and compact. One of the most striking, and yet interesting of this article is the place of the piece of advise offered to attend to projects one at a time in contrast to what has and been advocated today, coined multitask. You painted it’ll yield less productivity. In that case, what do you have to say further on this mindset of people, business professionals, Human resources managers who believe so much in this. Thanks.