Category: Musings

Page 6 of 7

How I Stay Productive Running a Productivity Company

Posted on August 10, 2012 in Front Page and Musings. 0 Comments Tags: , .

You don’t start your own productivity company unless you’re already a productivity geek. As one such geek, you’d think I try every cool new app, tool, service, and widget. But with so many out there it just gets overwhelming and tedious. At heart, I’m a minimalist and my lone productivity strategy is “less is more.” This isn’t just something I look for when I’m working, it’s a way of life.

I’m the kind of guy who wants simple tools that get things done without broadcasting what I’m doing to the rest of the world and without exposing to the world how I got things done. I think that stuff is just distracting. For example, I removed the “Sent by my iPhone” tagline from my phone when I first got it, don’t wear clothing with brand names on it, and own my own domains for email. I don’t like being an advertisement or being tied down to one platform or another.

A big part of keeping my business productive is avoiding unforeseen problems – specifically, security issues. I don’t like to put my information “in the cloud” because these large services create a big target for hackers who develop exploits. Take the recent case of Mat Honan, the journalist who was a victim of just such an attack. Just imagine how many different businesses would have their information compromised if their cloud was hacked like Mat’s was. I believe in “security through obscurity”. Nobody is going to hack one guy’s obscure setup, they’re going to focus on the big fish.

I also stay away from certain applications, including some Microsoft communication products, if I know they have a reputation of being riddled with security flaws and don’t handle web standards well. I always like to stay on the safe side and don’t want to spend any more of my time futzing with things to get them to work. Instead, I use Thunderbird for email because it’s simple, yet powerful and allows me to make extensive use of IMAP folders for organizing mail, which I can view in Thunderbird, online, and on my iPhone. Sure, that’s technically in a cloud, but it’s on my own server! Then to combat email overload, I have a ton of automatic filters set at the IMAP server level to sort incoming mail into the correct folder. I also create custom incoming addresses for different senders and subscriptions, event invitations, newsletters, business, personal, hobbies, music, etc.

For appointments and tasks, I use synchronized Google calendar that I can view in my browser and on my old school iPhone 4 (gasp!). I don’t care about Siri and I barely use any apps except Shazam, Backgammon, and Copy2Contact, of course. Why do I need the latest hardware for all that? I don’t use a to-do list but often put to-do items in the calendar for the day as untimed events to minimize the number of applications that I fiddle with. Serves me very well.

All in all, I find that being bogged down by all of the unnecessary things that we get under the guise of becoming more productive can be the biggest productivity killer. I use a couple of applications that allow me to streamline my tasks and eliminate unnecessary steps and avoid everything else. In business and in life, I always strive for “less is more.”

Outsource Your Tasks To Maximize Your Time

Posted on July 26, 2012 in Front Page and Musings. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

The 4-Hour Workweek approach has really brought small business outsourcing to the mainstream, but more than part of any productivity system it just makes sense. Do the math: By outsourcing time consuming tasks, you can apply your time to the stuff that really brings home the bacon money for your business.

When it comes to spending your time working smarter, not harder, it’s important to look at the time consuming and repetitive tasks that cut into your work time. A realtor needs to sell property, not spend time updating her blog or fixing up her website. A salesperson needs to close deals, not spend hours doing research or telemarketing. By outsourcing the things you don’t really have to do yourself, you free up all the time you need to do what only you can do.

Outsourcing Research

Research is a crucial part of any business, but the internet creates an endless stream of information and the research time never stops. Whether you need someone to hunt down new leads, do market research, or even summarize an article or book, outsourcing your research helps you get the information you need without the busy work that it takes to get there. In college, it was “wrong” to hire someone to give you the CliffsNotes version, now it’s one of the best ways to free up your busy schedule.

Outsourcing Marketing

Whether your marketing strategy is based around advertising, social media, content, cold calling, or anything else, you can find someone who can free up your time to focus on sales and running your business. Odds are, they can do it better than you as well because a) they specialize in marketing and b) they don’t have to juggle a ton of different business tasks. The same goes for other time consuming projects that are not entirely business related, like web design. Don’t spend your time doing a mediocre job on many things when you can hire specialists and do a great job on the few things you are great at.

Outsourcing Errands

Many people often talk about how much easier their life would be with an assistant without realizing how accessible they are. Virtual assistants are growingly popular because they can help you with just about anything you need, and don’t cost nearly as much as a full-time live assistant. Need someone to organize files, book a flight or hotel, follow up on calls, fill out paperwork, transcribe files, or even order food? Virtual assistant services and freelance assistants can do just about anything that doesn’t require their physical presence.

For basic tasks, you can even outsource to a low-cost ($4-$15 per hour) foreign virtual assistant service based in India, Thailand, or Australia. For more advanced tasks or those where native English skills are important, you can just as easily hire an American assistant for $10-$25 per hour.

The two keys to outsourcing the right way are a) doing the math to make sure this helps you make money rather than spend it because it frees up your time and b) making sure to be very specific about your needs and requirements to ensure that the project is handled properly, on budget, and on time. Don’t make excuses though: There are only so many hours in the day, so don’t spend your hours doing tedious tasks that don’t help your business grow.

Split Your Day Into Three For Smarter Appointment Scheduling

Posted on July 22, 2012 in Front Page and Musings. 0 Comments Tags: , .

You sit down to finish that report and – “A Mr. James is here to see you.” You get off of lunch ready to tackle a big project and – There are 28 unread messages in your inbox. How can we function when we’re dealing with everything all at once? Well, one of the best ways to get more done is to quit multitasking. So how should you manage your day?

Split Your Day into Three

Divide your workload into three types: hard work, client time, and light work. Obviously not all work is created equal, so by focusing on each of the three individually, you can get the most out of each one and get through each part of your day quicker.

Hard Work

This is the longest, hardest, and often most important work that you have to handle. Tough project? A report or presentation that’s going to take a lot of time? The best way to get a handle on the hardest or most time-consuming parts of your job is to get them out of your way as soon as possible instead of having the stress, worry, and overwhelming thoughts leaking over into the rest of your day.

At the beginning of your day, you are as sharp as you’ll be all day, don’t have a ton of stuff on your mind that compiled over the course of the day, and (hopefully) aren’t yet being constantly distracted. Use this time as your most effective work time and use it to focus on the tough, overwhelming, or very important tasks – the ones you don’t want to do or would rather put off. And turn off the phone and email alerts while you’re working!

Client Time

This is your appointment block. Outside of emergencies or extraordinary circumstances, allow clients to schedule appointments only during this time. Depending on how many appointments you make, this can take up half your day or just a couple of hours. It’s best to have client time after your hard work time, unless your time with clients is your hard work or you have to see clients first thing in the morning.

This can be a tough one because clients will often have time constraints, or if you’ve put client time on your calendar well in advance, they may have to wait a bit longer than usual. But its important to remember that the goal of this is to serve your clients better by focusing more on them and not being overwhelmed by a plethora of different thoughts, tasks, and issues.

Light Work

Leave the stuff that doesn’t require a ton of willpower for the end of your day. Paperwork, follow up calls, re-ordering, tackling email overload, etc. are usually not tasks that require immediate attention and aren’t difficult or stressful, so you shouldn’t have a procrastination problem as you would with larger tasks.

Use Metrics For Better Sales Productivity

Posted on July 20, 2012 in Front Page and Musings. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Productivity is all about getting better results more efficiently, but what’s the point if you can’t actually quantify those results? The key to improving your sales productivity is performance metrics. Metrics are about setting clear goals and developing measures for those goals. As you go, you can quantify exactly how much progress you have made or how many goals you’ve hit, whether you are tracking your work hours, number of sales, number of leads, or income.

Just like you can see an athlete’s performance from stats alone, breaking it down for yourself allows you to stay away from the guesswork and analyze exactly how productive you’ve been. You can then tweak to get better results more efficiently. Or at least break out of that season-long hitting slump you’ve been in.

Measuring Sales Productivity
To measure your productivity, you have to first set specific areas you want to improve. Do you want more sales, more money, more free time, higher paying clients, or all of the above? Then consider all of the steps you have to take to get to your goal and which steps are the most vital to the process.

If you were to focus all your efforts solely on getting more sales, you wouldn’t only be measuring the number of sales per day, per week, and per month. You’d also want to measure the number of steps and the time that it took to get to the sale to ensure that you’re working smarter, and not necessarily harder. Be brutal. Cut everything that isn’t essential from the process. Remember the Pareto principle – 20% of what you do earns you 80% of your income. He had your sales operation in mind when he made his observations.

Keeping Track of Sales Performance
As you track your sales productivity, you’ll notice trends. You will be able to identify good trends and bad trends more easily because you’ll have the hard stats right in front of you. Now all that is left is to identify the reason good days were good and bad days were rough. Which daily tasks were more effective in getting you closer to your goal and maximizing your time, and which ones were essentially busy work that did nothing to help you reach your goals? It’s time to tweak your process and start using your time better.

Tweaking to Maximize Your Time
Now that you’ve started on the road to a more process-based sales operation, you can quantify results and steps more readily. Within a month or two, you’ll be able to see exactly which steps are giving you the most bang for your time and which ones are just losing you money because of the amount of non goal-oriented time they consume. You can outsource these tasks, automate them with applications, or even get rid of them from your operation entirely. More importantly, you’ll be able to see which steps provide you the most possible efficiency and productivity and get you closer to your goals.

Just like without measuring an athlete’s performance, we’d never know what a lousy passer Tim Tebow is, if you aren’t measuring your productivity, you will never know exactly how good you are or how good you can be.