4 Productivity Tips for Entrepreneurs

I’m sure you’re rushing the holidays and, as you can not help it, your head is already thinking about your business and what you’ll do next year.  We get it, so we thought these productivity tips for entrepreneurs may help you plan a better strategy in the future.

Actually, no matter if you are a freelancer working from home or have a business with employees, machinery and a warehouse in an industrial estate.   The character of the entrepreneur and the tasks carried out have many things in common. 

 Generally, anyone who is behind a business initiative often has to do hundreds of tasks a day, from managing a schedule, and payments to having meetings and dealing with suppliers, customers, and partners... If you think about everything you need to do in a single day, it may even seem overwhelming.

What’s the trick so our busy every day doesn’t make us lose perspective?  The first tip articulates everything we will tell and summarizes the post: Do not focus on doing more, focus on doing better.

This is the most basic tip, but also the most difficult one to achieve.   The main difference between entrepreneurship and working for others is that entrepreneurs never really close the business at the end of the day, we take all the work home. 

Our head is always busy with thoughts of everything we still need to do, we consult the email at odd times, get up on a Sunday at 8 am to work... This, and I speak from personal experience,  is a capital mistake. 

 If you’re not able to make room for leisure and your family, in the medium term you may start having that awful feeling of being burned. 

Plan a schedule and try to respect it, usually, nothing is so urgent that you must do it at 8 pm on a Sunday.  Don’t feel guilty about taking a break and resting, because it is essential.

Eh! And remember you also should take breaks at work.  You can not and you shouldn’t work for 12 hours straight.

Set targets because that’s the first step to fulfill them.  If you just let yourself go by inertia, things may go well, I won’t deny it, but it will be a lot harder.

Setting realistic goals for the short, medium and long-term helps from a productivity point of view because that allows us to prioritize actions to take.

This is easier said than done, but it is essential. Think of yourself as an entrepreneur and make a list of what defines you.  You can even create a SWOT matrix of yourself (Strengths, Opportunities, Weaknesses, and Threats). 

How can self-criticism help productivity? Basically, self-criticism let you find what you need to improve and enhance.  It’s a great way to establish actions to take with a practical and business sense.

They’re responsible for us going nuts every day. Productivity thieves are something we all must deal with, but that can be minimized. 

The first you need to do is detect what are your productivity thieves.  The most common ones usually are:

Email: How many emails do you answer per day? Often, you stop what you’re doing to answer an email. After you’re done, you get back to work until you remember there was something else you had to do, you send another email, get back to work again, and now you have lost all focus... The Productivity advice for this is simple: Priorities. Not all emails are urgent.

Meetings: The time thieves par excellence.  In my experience, only 20% of the meetings are productive and, of those, only 20% of the time spent is useful. Try to keep meetings at the minimum (especially offline ones) and keep them short, because meetings are like gas and if you don’t put a limit to them, they expand and expand.

Phone: Same as the email, if possible, make all necessary calls in the same period of time.  Reserve some time at the end of the morning or late in the afternoon for phone calls.