I’m all about maximizing productivity. How can I do more, better, faster? Put any article in front of me that provides some new lifehack that’s going to make me more efficient, and I’ll click on it faster than you can say 15 Habits That Will Totally Transform Your Productivity. Effective time management is crucial for entrepreneurs because time is a scarce resource, but it’s also something we have almost total control over how we use.
I also firmly believe that until you optimize and prioritize your work appropriately, you can’t effectively scale. Through reading and practice, I’ve developed a system to maximize my time. I thought I’d share with all of you in hopes it might provide you with some ideas for increasing your own productivity.
Practice Smart Scheduling
Inevitably, we all have times each day when we’re most productive. I’m an early-bird. I get into the office around 7:30am and, I swear, I can change the world before 9 a.m. I also find that bursts of creative thought come more easily for me during the middle part of the day, and I start to experience diminishing returns around 4 p.m. Paying closer attention to my habits and beginning to build my schedule around them was key to maximizing my productivity.
Knowing all of this, I start my typical day by getting a jumpstart on the things that are going to take the most heavy-lifting each morning, so I get the momentum going. Then I schedule meetings and phone calls, always back-to-back, from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. and again from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. This leaves me the middle part of every day to get really substantive work done, and I save the end of the day for doing mindless tasks such as email review.
I encourage you to spend some time paying attention to your productivity schedule. If you’re struggling to find your rhythm, consider checking out something like the Pomodoro Technique that involves 4 sets of 25-minute spurts of focus broken up by 5 minutes of rest. If you complete all 4, then you’re rewarded with a 15-20 minute break.
Use Your Fringe Time Wisely
I’ve found the absolute best way for me to schedule meetings is back-to-back. This means I have solid blocks of time where I can be in “presenter mode” and solid blocks of time where I can focus on my work. However, there’s always the meeting that runs short (yay!) or long (boo!) that messes with my system. This is where fringe time comes in. I learned about the concept in Jessica Turner’s book, The Fringe Hours, and while the book is about finding time for yourself, I’ve found the practice to work particularly well at work, too.
On my daily to-do list, which I’ll talk about more in a moment, I identify tasks that can be done in 10 minutes or less. That way, when I find myself with a few moments of spare time, I can use it respond to an email, review a blog post or pay a bill. It’s amazing what you can knock out in just a handful of minutes if you plan for it and you put your mind to it.
Set Daily Priorities
If it’s not on my to-do list, it won’t get done. That’s the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I use TeuxDeux. I don’t think it’s the best, and I don’t even think the app developers make updates to it anymore, but it’s so ingrained in my day-to-day, I don’t know what I would ever do if it went away. I have a really (productive) method to my madness.
Most of my to-dos are set by email (stay tuned) or following meetings and client calls, and they’re grouped by client and priority. I only work on one client at a time. This methodology ensures I am acutely focused on what I must get done that day, and that I give my undivided attention to each particular account. It also eliminates the anxiety I used to have when I tried to multi-task. The key is to only set as many to-dos as you can actually get done. If you get in the habit of moving them each day, you won’t feel an obligation to get through your list!
Follow the 80 Percent Rule
I was reading over an advice column for entrepreneurs and one of the tips read something like; if someone else can do it 80 percent as well, let them do it. WOW, lightbulb. I did some Googling and found this is called the 80 percent rule for delegation. Giving up control can be tough, but it’s the only way to scale your business. By following this rule, I have freed up my time to focus on Prosper rather than working in Prosper, and by leaving a lot of the legwork to others, I’ve found in many cases my team can actually do it better because they have the time, effort and energy to dedicate to it.
Own Your Inbox
Not the other way around! It wasn’t until I actually started to do this in practice that I understood how much control my inbox actually had over me. Think you could never go a whole day without answering emails? Hear me out.
I thoroughly check my email at the end of each day. I find that 85 percent of my messages have already been answered by my team and I can just delete them. For the rest, I review them, add them to my to-do list and file them away in folders to be addressed later. By making emails part of my to-do list, which is ordered by priority, I determine how urgent a response actually is. When I get in the next morning, I take another quick review of the emails that may have come in overnight, then I leave my inbox again until the end of the day. I do keep an eye on my email all day, however, if I’m tempted to respond and I have more pressing things to do, I close it immediately.
This approach takes serious discipline, but have I mentioned it’s life-changing? I now spend a total of 15-20 minutes in email each day – when it used to be more like 2 or 3 hours.
As a new twist, I’ve started using SaneBox, which automatically files my emails – leaving those that are priority, based on my email history, in my primary inbox and directly filtering less pressing emails and newsletters to folders I can check later. If email is your Achilles heel, I suggest you check it out!
There you have it! I’m a total productivity junkie. I would LOVE to hear your tips, tricks and productivity hacks. Tweet me @lindsmmullen or add them in the comments.
