It can be hard to stay productive day in and day out, especially as a business owner. Because time is valuable, and you don’t always have enough time in the day for all your tasks, it’s important to stay focused and be productive. Follow these 5 steps to benefit your business and to help improve your productivity:
The steps include:
- Eliminating your distractions. Whether it’s TV or social media, stay away! Unless, of course you plan on using these to benefit your business, but even then, be careful. Although social media can be a great way to market your brand and create lasting customer relationships, delegating marketing tasks to someone else might be a better idea. Having partial focus on this social media all day could cause you to lose focus and get distracted easily, eating up a lot of time.
- Making your goals realistic. Setting goals is difficult. Often people find themselves asking “How many goals do I set?” “How often do I set goals” “How attainable should these goals be?” Goals are made to make you more organized, not more overwhelmed. Start out with setting just one goal, but as time goes on, add more. Set goals at different lengths of time and see what works best. Make sure that your goals are visible and tangible, because people will work harder to accomplish these goals. Be ambitious, but still realistic
- Set up time to handle your email. Although opening and answering emails as they come in may seem like an effective method, it is not! Instead, set aside certain times of the day to respond to emails. This will keep you from being interrupted during any given task and allow you to maintain focus throughout. When you do check your emails, this method is a sure way to avoiding missed emails that end up slipping through the cracks and going unanswered.
- Establishing a reward system. Nothing gets employees to work harder and put in the extra effort than a reward system. Typically, these system are based upon four areas: compensation, benefits, recognition, and appreciation. Accomplishments both big and small are worth noting, so give your employees the extra morale they need to be more efficient and focused.
- Make sure that everybody has time to take care of themselves. As much as you’d like your employees to be working at maximum effort at all times of the day and with extended hours when necessary, they do need a break. Ample amounts of sleep and time away from work will, in turn, make employees more productive when they are working. Fatigue will not only correlate to diminishing returns, but cause employees to associate their work with somewhere they don’t want be.
Create an environment suited for efficiency and productivity. You’ll find that applying these tips to your small business will be better not only for you, but for employees as well. Treat your employees like people, not machines, and follow these tips to get your business off to a great start.
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