You’ve got yourself 50 dollary-dos, and you’re trying to work out what you can do with it to improve your productivity. There are so many things that you can do, and we’re going to discuss some of those. Shelve the 50 bucks, shuck it back in your wallet just for a moment, and then we’ll get to whatever you think you should be spending that money on to start with.
Productivity is so important. Productivity comes down to three different main pillars, and whenever I’m writing a task list, I write which one of these 3 out of 10 are the most affected.
What Do You Want to Improve?
You have, ‘Does the task that you’re doing save money, save time, or create money?’ You can have something that saves a heap of time, which boosts your productivity, but you have something that saves you money, which ultimately boosts your bottom line. You have something that creates money that boosts your bottom line, and sometimes you’re lucky to get a pearl of an idea that you’re going to implement to do two of the above, sometimes saves money and creates money, but most of the time it can save time and create money.
Write a List
To work out how and what tasks do what, write down a big list of all of the things that happen in your business. Once you’ve done that, you can then work out which ones you should be focusing on more and which ones you should be trimming back. If you don’t know what tasks to focus on, you need to employ a tool such as Manic Time, Rescue Time, Observe IT, or any of the other time tracking tools that show you where your day goes. They’re cool utilities, and when you jump in there, they all have trials available that you can use to have a look and see how much time you spend on things. One of the most productive things you do is recording analytically what you spend your time on where.
Read: How to Stay Awake and Productive With Less Sleep
Record Every Task
I am an absolute Nazi when it comes to recording things. I record how many keystrokes I make per day, how many words I type, the average length of the word, the average length of the email, the shortest email, the longest email, how many emails I send per hour, per day, per month, per year, and who my top 10 recipients are, who my top 10 receiving emails are from, etc. I know all these different stats and I can pull them up in a couple of minutes. I’ve got everything analysed. I can bring it down to the basic numbers, and that is good information.
It might take a little while to start off with to implement, but once you’ve got this information in front of you, then you can start working with it. If you look and you go, ‘Oh, I don’t spend that much time on Facebook,’ then you have a look and you go, ‘Oh, my goodness, I’m spending 10 hours a week,’ it’s pretty standard on Facebook.
Review How You Spend Your Time
If you’re spending 10 hours a week on Facebook and you think, ‘Oh, what could I do with that 10 hours?’ If you’re like me, I could crack out a whole book in 10 hours. I could easily finish a book. I could be doing anything in the yard. I could be hanging out with friends. I could be doing a bunch of other things that aren’t just scrolling through depressing pictures of a small portion of people’s lives, and I use Facebook very loosely when I’m talking about Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and all the other things that I want you to jump on, watch, follow and like.
Read: Why You Need the Best IT Support for Your Business
Using 50 Dollars for Time Management
If you are on these platforms quite a bit, they suck some time away, but it might not just be those. You might look and think, ‘Wow, I spend 20 minutes a day going through junk emails,’ so cheap. You could get a virtual assistant and pay them 10 bucks an hour, and have them jump in on your computer before you get to work and clean through all that spam.
We all want to be more effective and more efficient. If you’re more effective and more efficient than your competitors, then you’ll be having a business that’s running better than your competitor’s. The ultimate goal is to turn that $50 into more than $50. Manic Time and Rescue Time are both tools that you can use to increase the amount of visibility that you have on where you spend your time. If you’re able to save two hours a week using this tool, you’re already in front in only a couple of weeks by spending a bit of money.
How to Improve Productivity
The next verse in productivity, if you’ve decided that your time’s already a lean mean time machine, is quite simple. No distractions. Spend $50, grab your laptop, jump on the train, while driving to your local city, and sit in the parkland and just listen to the birds, smell the fragrances, and become one with nature. If you do that, you’ll find that you feel a bit better, and that can make you more productive.
Stepping away from everything, and just writing a list can make you more productive. Just being relaxed and able to see things from a different perspective does wonders for business. Stepping away is the best thing that you can do in business as a business owner. Getting away from the tools and the hustle and bustle of day to day is just magic.
So, maybe you spend that $50 just to go cruise and check out what’s going on in the local parks, but maybe you’re already relaxed and maybe you’ve already got your time under wraps.
Use Your Money to Hire Someone to Look at Your Productivity
You’re an efficient lean mean machine. You’re cracking out a bunch of words and you’re really, really productive. Whatever you’re doing in business, you’re doing at 10 fold and going gang busters. So, you’re still sitting there going, ‘Well, Josh, what do I do with this 50 bucks? This is terrible. I need to get this spent. I want to become more productive.’
What I suggest is to contact a company that can make your business more productive and more optimised. If you’re already feeling like you’re at the pinnacle of success, and everything is really lean and optimised, you probably need some new eyes to look at the problem. There are always ways to make your business more productive. There are plenty of businesses out there. I run one of them, Business Efficiency Experts, but there are plenty of businesses out there that you can jump onto.
They’ll do an analysis of your business, and once they’ve analysed everything, they can go in and say, ‘Yeah, okay, look. This is a huge expense.’ Maybe they’ll cost more than 50 bucks; maybe they won’t. A lot of the time, they won’t and they’ll come through on the door report and they’ll give you a figure back and say, ‘I’ve noticed that the accounting package that you’re using is costing you this much time. It’s costing you this much per month. Let’s get rid of it.’
Although they may cost more than $50 initially, the amount of money saved could be significantly more than the $50. It’s a different approach, but definitely worth doing. Although it may cost more than $50 initially, overall, it’s going to be a better investment, and you’ll have saved significantly more time and money in the long run.
Read: Top 10 Proven Strategies to Increase Business Productivity
The Final Word
I’d love to hear from you on this one. Let us know what you use to become productive. What would you like us to talk about and how could we help you guys become more productive? Contact us and stay good.
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