By Shrijay Sheth
Every entrepreneur would want to be as productive as possible throughout the day. Unfortunately, you too have a 24-hour day just like everybody else. So, what would you do for doubling your productivity? How would you manage 48-hour productivity from a 24-hour day?
As a Founder, you have the (sometimes unseen) hurdles of entrepreneurship while juggling marketing and sales calls, client questions coming up every now and then you have all the social media comments flooding in. As if that is not enough, you have the monthly financials to manage.
Businesses are moving faster than ever, compelling startup owners to react faster and make decisions that create an impact. Successful entrepreneurs do not react to every provocation that comes their way. Instead, they make the most out of what they have and manage everything with focus and precision. We all strive for minimum efforts – maximum impact. Here’s how you can achieve this by turning your 24-hour day as productive as possible:
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Trusting your people
“It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.” – Steve Jobs.
Half of your job is done by having the right people at the right place and at the right time and this is possible by building the A-team for your startup. This means, having a smart team in place so that you have people hired for a specific task. This means, there is no need for micromanagement and individuals take responsibility for achieving tasks designated to them. Sometimes organizationally there is a churn of employees which results in salaries and ramp-up times increasing. Aligning them with the team to deliver maximum efficiencies can take up time which otherwise would have been spent productively.
The key lies in having a lean team and ensuring retention – this ensures faster turnarounds and higher efficiencies. You have a team who is performing operations at a certain pace and hence motivating them to deliver faster can do wonders. Otherwise, it takes time for people to fit into your environment and then deliver at your expectations. It is not advisable to dismiss those people who have optimized their standards to match the business pace.
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Process Automation
Technology has enabled us to automate some repetitive processes by aligning them based on business requirements. Business process automation can effectively use technology to optimise team and processes. For raising productivity, you will need to move beyond traditional data management to advanced software systems and programs that help to integrate all the processes.
As an entrepreneur, you can use schedulers to keep a tight watch on your schedule and ensure you never give more time than due. This will help you focus on one task at a time and efficiently manage your schedule for timely output. There are plenty of project management tools that are put to best use by the team. This also negates the risks of manual errors by saving up your time and thereby enhancing productivity. Leveraging technology can be a boon for functions like customer service, analysis, and even HR services.
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One task at a time
Managing multiple tasks can be daunting for startup founders, especially while scaling up. The key to task completion lies in prioritizing each task and wrapping it up before taking up the next one. This will require scheduling activities with an aim to achieve the tasks within a stipulated time. Instead of taking up multiple tasks one should focus on a particular task.
This will also require you to block the calendar such that there are no meeting lined up, no taking calls, and not even entertaining walk-in queries by team-members. The idea is to shut everything else to function effectively. Following this religiously will also allow you some time for yourself while achieving results.
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Power of Project Management
In the race to achieve tasks assigned by clients and getting billable work done, sometimes the role of a project manager goes unnoticed. This is the key position that offers a solution for efficient results. The task of a Project Manager involves driving the entire team and empowering the revenue centres.
The power of having project management lays in orchestrating an entire team for a unified goal towards an amplified output.
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Onboarding off-floor resources
This is where you will truly experience the time you end up saving. Reduced turnaround time will have you experience utmost efficiency levels, leaving you more time to perform core business activities. Hiring business professional service experts like legalwiz.in can help your business to function in a fully compliant manner. Here, you end up saving a lot of time by outsourcing the tasks that you are not expert in. Here, you avoid all the hassles of hiring a new team to get in a segment that is not your forte.
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Don’t overwork yourself to get all 48 hours
Having too many expectations from yourself and the team may also prove taxing and counter-productive. Entrepreneurs are infamous for overcommitting things and then end up falling short. This happens when you plan to do many tasks in one day and thereby end up spending time over meeting and discussions. Such a process will mitigate the delivery from your end wherein you will find yourself running to achieve your goals.
Start with a reasonable commitment with proven tactics to get work done – from yourself and the team. This way you are saving manpower for impact-based work rather than planning and strategizing the same. You should be working towards reducing the turnaround time. Do not try overstretching yourself to an extent of burnout that ends up eating into your personal time as well. One of the fundamental things to understand is that through technology and process changes, people remain the same and so do the principles of core management. You will need to balance things and still come out as a winner in the end.
Conclusion
Again, apart from adhering to the points above, doubling your productivity will require you to say ‘no’ more than ever. It just does not matter even if you are inclined towards saying ‘yes’ for things like evening walk with friends and even rejecting a tea invitation. No, all these will not make you selfish but rather have you time to focus on yourself.
Try not succumbing to your desires and stick to the basics of your daily business. It’s not a crime to use this as an excuse to get away from the daily grind of building a business as long as it helps you to run the business that adds value to your life and even benefits employees and customers.
Shrijay Seth is an entrepreneur with more than ten years of experience in working with hyper-growing digital commerce companies across the globe. Currently, he runs an eCommerce strategy and Analytics consulting company, along with a LegalTech venture in India called https://www.legalwiz.
