Do you feel like there is never enough time to do what you want with your business?
You’re not alone.
It seems like every business owner I speak with or read or meet has this issue. It’s kind of a calling card for business owners (as well as for professionals and even in our personal lives).
So the big question for our lives is:
How do we get more time?
Put another way, how do we get more productive with the time we do have?
One study found that as much as 70% of the time we spend at worked is wasted time.
That’s pretty crazy, but I believe it. When you think about your day it can feel sometimes like you get nothing done even if you’ve worked several hours.
And on the flip side it can seem like you got a lot done, but didn’t have time to do everything.
If you want to grow your business, and I’m guessing you do, you need to be as productive as possible with your time.
Here are some of the most common productivity pitfalls for small business owners.
1. Repetitive Communication
Communication is great for relationships. Talking with your spouse, family and friends is about life, feelings, dreams and more is something that builds relationships.
In business, communication can take on a level of priority that is too high. Yes, some communication is critical to success, but repetitive communication is often worked on as high priority when it should often be a low priority or delegated or even eliminated.
Repetitive communication is communication that you do over and over again. An example would be customer support. Businesses often get repetitive communication where the same question is asked over and over.
Should the small business owner be answering the same question over and over? Probably not. When something is repetitive it’s an indication that it can be:
- Lower Priority (This is not really a huge issue)
- Delegated (Someone else can learn to answer this question)
- Eliminated (Let’s answer the question on our website)
Document the communication you do every day. If you have repetitive communication you have an area where you can become more productive.
2. Interruptive Communication
I used to think this was a new issue for businesspeople with email constantly being part of our day. We’ve have email open all day on our computers and we click on the email icon on our phones like a reflex.
But I think interruptive communication has been around a very long time.
Phone calls can be very interruptive. Even people dropping to your office for whatever reason can be interruptive. Not only is the interruption distracting, but if you’re thinking about being interrupted you will struggle to complete the task you want to complete.
Successful business owners seem to setup systems that lessen or eliminate interruptive communication. It’s not universal. Some business owners like a culture of interruption where the owner is often the biggest culprit of interrupting employees.
But in general I think people like avoiding distractions. They’re okay once in a while like if the CEO stops in to say hello to an employee once a month or once every few months. No big deal.
But more regular interruptions like emails, phone calls, etc. really add up.
Look at your typical workday and see how often you stop what you’re doing for interruptive communication. See if you can work around those interruptions by setting up a system where the communication is queued for later, handled by someone else or a similar system.
3. Repetitive Tasks
It’s okay to have repetitive tasks. We all do it in life. It’s how we work through the day.
The tough part for business owners, however, is that it’s really a requirement as an entrepreneur to delegate repetitive tasks.
When you’re repeating something over and over every day it’s likely something that someone else can do. And that’s how you can grow your business.
It’s fine if you want to be a worker in your business and you do the repetitive task every day. But you can’t lead an organization that way. There isn’t enough time in the day.
Look at all the tasks you do throughout the day. If you’re repeating the same tasks over and over it’s an indication that you can prioritize those tasks, document the procedure for doing them and delegate them to others or perhaps eliminate them all together if they’re not really a high priority.
For me it was uploading client blog posts to WordPress. I used to do this all the time until finally I realized that others are just as or more capable of performing the task than I am. So I created a procedure and delegated the task.
Huge time saver for me.
4. Inefficiency (Automation Avoidance)
As humans I think many of us are programmed to avoid change even when change can mean that in the long run we’ll be more efficient and effective.
I like to look at tasks to determine if there is a way to automate the task. We’re afraid of automation a lot of the time because we feel secure in what we do. We’re good at it and we don’t want to “lose” our job.
But we can’t grow unless we embrace automation and delegating especially as an entrepreneur.
Touching on my earlier example. If I wanted to be a blog post uploader and formatter I could have kept on doing that with blog posts on WordPress sites.
But we figured out ways to make the process more efficient and identified the person that could do the task the best and the person that should be doing the task.
Looking at your own inefficiencies and finding automation solutions can be huge for opening up time. Sometimes it comes down to the fact that you’re not good at something.
The best CEOs often can’t perform the every day tasks in their companies and that’s okay. If you don’t do it every day you’re going to lose your skills. You shouldn’t be doing that task. Leave it to the people that are better equipped and get out of the way.
5. Repetitive Training
Finally we have repetitive training. For a while I would catch myself bringing on new writers to the blogging team and I would retrain each one of them via email.
Finally I realized I couldn’t keep training over and over again. It was getting back to repetitive communication. I was doing the same thing over and over again.
There was a better solution that included training materials and trusting that new writers could use the materials to learn the job and do what they need to do to succeed.
Conclusion
A big theme in this post is repetition. It’s great for life because the more you repeat something the more efficient you’ll become, but if you want to grow and grow a business you, the owner, need to delegate or automate repetition.
If you’re doing the same thing over and over it’s usually a sign that it’s time to move on to something that isn’t repetitive. The best business owners often are the ones on the front. They’re looking for the new things. They’re experimenting and thinking.
If you want to be a successful small business owner you have to identify the areas of your life and business that are holding you back. Embrace the fear of the unknown and move forward doing what you’re afraid to do, but that you know need to be done in order to grow.
