By: Gary Ruplinger
One thing I think that a lot of business owners, especially home based business, need to learn how to do better is improve productivity.
Being productive during the key can mean the difference between working 30 hours a week and making a lot of money or thinking your "working" 70 hours a week and barely getting by.
Here are a few tips on how to increase your productivity.
First, you need to plan your day before you start it. As the great motivational speaker, Jim Rohn, said "Don't start the day until it's pretty well finished."
What he means by that is you should have your entire day planned in advance so that you know what you're going to be doing for that day.
It may sound like an obvious point to make but so many people show up to work with no plan of what they're going to do that day. For many people, this bad habit carries over from their days as an employee.
I know that in my own business if I ever have a day where I haven't taken the time to sit down and write down everything I need to do that day, I get less than half of what I would have gotten done if I'd have taken the time to plan the day.
The next tip on how to be more productive is simply to plan more work for the day. Have you ever heard the saying, "If you want to get something done, give it to the busiest person you know."
This isn't just a saying but it's absolutely true. You see, busy people need to be more self disciplined with their time and will find a way to get something done. Conversely, a person who isn't very busy and has a lot of time will tend to procrastinate and do nothing since they have all the time in the world anyway.
I know that when I plan a lot of work for a single day, I'm far more productive, sometimes getting done in one day what used to take me a week simply because I have so much to do that I need to keep a little extra "spring in my step" in order to get everything on my list done that day.
Now you can take this too far and plan so much work that you'll never be able to finish it in one day, and that can be very demotivating. I'd recommend planning what seems like a lot of work, but not so much that you won't be able to finish it no matter what you do in a day.
If you have less time to waste and screw around with during your work day, you’ll see your productivity soaring – just give it a try for a few weeks and watch how much more you get done. |
