Squeezing More Productivity out of Your Day

Sep 06, 2018, 02:00 PM

We can all agree that we'd like to be more productive each day. As a business owner, you probably feel many days escape from you. You'll start off with a task list for the day and end up completing little to none of it as the day winds down.

Putting out fires is a constant reason for not being able to execute on the things you need to complete either in your screen-printing/embroidery shop.

The long-term solution is to continue to hire for the tasks that you do every day. With people that you trust, you can delegate. Of course, this isn't easy. You're used to handling everything yourself. But your goal is for the business to run without you.

But what can you do today? What can you implement right now to help make yourself and others more productive?

Here are two tips that I use every day to increase productivity.

  1. Limit your day - That's right, shrink the number of hours you're giving yourself to work. If you normally come in at 7am and leave at 7pm. Leave at 6pm, no excuses.

What this does is force you to complete higher priority tasks. You will have no choice but to pick higher value items to complete and push off lower priority ones. It also makes you fully understand the value of delegating more of your day to complete what's important.

This also helps to waste less time. How much time do you feel is spent on email, Facebook, Instagram? Instead of waiting for a response for 10min and taking a break by scrolling through Facebook, you'll be forced to knock out another task before leaving early.

  1. To-do List - Every morning, before you start answering email and going through jobs, write down the tasks you need to complete for that day. If your list is longer than 5 items, draw a line and only focus on those top 5.

This truly helps to visualize your progress and understand if you're behind or not.

Bonus Tip: Write down what you actually did that day next to your to-do list and you'll be able to visualize your progress and understand if you're behind or not. This also helps to know the tasks to start delegating off if you're seeing recurring items that push your off track.

Let us know how it works and if you have more tips!

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