Managing Productivity

Have you ever started your day with this sort of question?

“What do I want to do today?”

If you have, then read on because this sort of question marks the start of an ineffective day.

Effective business owners don’t start out their day asking “what do I want to do?” They ask themselves a completely different set of questions.

They’ll begin with the question” What are the most important, highest leverage activities that need to get done?” and then they’ll produce a list of the most important activities that answer that question.

After that, they estimate the amount of time each activity should take.

Next, they examine the list of important activities that must be done and determine which activities they should do themselves and who they are going to ask to do the remaining activities.

Then when they start work they tackle the most important, highest leverage task or activity first. They do not ask the question of themselves “which one of these tasks do I want to do now?”

Remember no business owner is born effective. You have to cultivate effectiveness and you do that by practicing the habits of effectiveness. After all you wouldn’t want an employee who worked on what they thought they should work on. So you should respect your business at the very least as much as you want your team to.

The important thing here is to be conscious of the choices you make when deciding what to work on. The yardstick is to pick activities based on what your company needs from you.

If you pick the most important task to work on first you’ll be more effective, your company will be more profitable, and you’ll be able to work less so you can actually pick fun things to do outside of work instead of the poor substitutes you’ve been using to fill your work days.

So remember – it’s not what you want to do – it’s what your business needs done.

If you’ve tracked the way you spend your time you should have crystal clarity about how you are currently using it.

Any surprises?

Are you doing things that you shouldn’t be doing? If so, it’s costing you a lot more than you think, here’s why…

Your business is a system. When you study systems you learn that the maximum output of any process is set by its scarcest resource. And what are the key resources needed by your business? They are; Money; People and Time, aren’t they?

Let’s remind ourselves what’s involved, starting with the first of the trio.

Money – If you have the right business model and you are effectively progressing toward your business goals you should either have, or have access to enough money. And the ability to get more isn’t constrained; there are plenty of investors for the right businesses.

People – There is no limit usually to the people you can recruit or outsource to, especially when you have enough money.

Time – Of the 3 major resources time is scarcest. It’s also totally perishable and cannot be stored. Yesterday’s time is gone forever and will never come back.

Everything you do and your business does requires time. All work (whether useful or not) wears away your time. But, most business owners (at least the unsuccessful ones) take for granted this unique, irreplaceable, totally perishable, and necessary resource.

Competent business owners realise that time is the limiting factor. So, ask yourself the question:

1. What are some of the activities that I am currently doing that do not contribute to my effectiveness?

And once you come up with some answers the next question to think about is:

2. How can I eliminate these time thieves, automate them, or pass them off to someone else?

Then once you’ve done that ask yourself;

3. What are the productive activities that I should be working on?

If you are not sure what activities you should be doing, let me explain how you can arrive at the right answer.

Just imagine for a moment you were going to New Zealand for a year or so and you were going to recruit a manager to grow your business while you were away. Before you left, the new manager asked you – what were the activities that he had to concentrate on, on a daily basis if he was really serious about growing your business as quickly as possible?

What do you think your answer would be?

Surely it would be something like: “Where do you think you should be spending your time.” If you are running your business and if you want to be effective you should be able to answer these two questions.

strong>1. What am I getting paid to do?
2. What should I be paid to do if I am being paid for the right things to be done in my position?

Once you are clear about that – you can then begin to chop out activities that don’t make the list. In my upcoming notes to you I’ll show you how to do exactly that – and get rid of the wasteful activities that clog up your cash flow.

As we’ve been talking about learning new habits of effectiveness it’s as well to bear in mind that when establishing a new routine that requires a behaviour change, quite often there are a number of setbacks along the way.

How you react to these setbacks will ultimately determine the degree to which you adopt effective time management habits.

There are three things to consider when dealing with setbacks and they are:

Lapse…….. Relapse …….. Collapse

A lapse is a slight error or slip; it’s the first instance of backsliding into your former habit. It’s a discreet event like not concentrating on the Top 3 or setting aside time to plan. A Relapse occurs when lapses string together for a continued period of time. A Collapse arises when a relapse becomes permanent, and all hope of getting back into the groove is given up altogether.

While some bounce back and use the slip as a signal to increase their commitment. It is all too often the case for a relapse to cause a negative reaction which festers until the desired behaviour is given-up completely.

There are two ways to manage this. The first is to realise the importance of consistency when establishing any habit and commit to avoid and prevent slips all together. The second is to respond to any slip by immediately returning to the desired behaviour.

For some people, a lapse might cause them to feel as if they have no reason to go on with the habit – or they can start again. But the truth is quite different. It’s important to appreciate this point because it will make habituation easier over the long term.

When you lapse, instead of thinking it’s really not worth going on with the habit because there are too many distractions, challenge yourself to try again, and immediately recommit yourself so your lapse doesn’t turn into a relapse or a collapse?

Obviously you should try …and of course you can.

The point is this – even when you’ve slipped, you are still in control. Only you can decide to get back on track, or, postpone your re-commitment and have your entire effort collapse. The choice is yours.

But try and you’ll be that much closer to becoming a competent business owner and entrepreneur.

Profit Note: Install The Habit Of Time Management

The week has begun, there are lots to do today, and this is an important – albeit lengthy message, so lets start.

The heart of this post is the issue of effectiveness – and more to the point the HABIT OF EFFECTIVENESS, and so this being the case I would really like to show how habits are formed as well as a strategy you can use to bed in this – and new habits in general – not only faster but in such a way that they will be more likely to last..

It’s critical to remember that effectiveness is not inborn.

Just like each and every one of us had to learn to ride a bicycle, because no one is born knowing how – every competent business owner or manager had to learn to be effective and practice being effective until it became a habit.

Peter Drucker, a great writer on management competence tells us that:

“Effective managers do not start with their tasks. They start with their time. And they do not start out planning. THEY START BY FINDING OUT WHERE THEIR TIME ACTUALLY GOES. Then they attempt to manage their time and to cut back on unproductive usages of their time”

Now we need a simple way to ensure that what we learn about effective time keeping actually sticks.

Here is a great model on how learning a new skill takes place. Once you understand the model, you can leverage it to install new habits rapidly. Pay careful attention here,
first I’ll explain it, then give you examples to make it easier to understand, then I’ll show you how to use it for your own advantage.

Learning new skills is divided into four different stages of competence. The theory is that as you approach something to be learned you actually pass through four phases on the way to doing something without even thinking about how to do it.

Phase 1 – you don’t know how to do something and you don’t even know that you don’t know.

Phase 2 – you now know all the different things you don’t know and you begin to work on learning them.

Phase 3 – you now know what you need to know, you can do the skills necessary, but it takes all of your concentration.

Phase 4 – you can now carry out the skills necessary without thinking about it, in other words you have developed a habit.

OK, now let me give you two examples of how this work in your life.

How habits are formed in practice

Let’s look at this through a simple example, just to make sure you really get it, let’s take a look at learning to tide a bicycle.

Phase 1 – First there was a time when you knew nothing about riding a bicycle – you didn’t
know there were pedals, breaks, gears were and probably were oblivious of the all important issue of balance.

Phase 2 – Next you started to learn about riding a bike – your parents would have explained how to ride one, showing you how to change the gears, raise and lower the saddle and you would have started trying to ride one – with the help of parents – and you would have realised there was a lot to learn but you were basically still unable to ride.

Phase 3 – After a lot of practice and concentration on how to ride a bike – you were still not ready yet to signal left or right, talk to others and ride all at the same time (never mind cycle in a straight line with your arms folded) – even though you were capable of riding a bicycle you had still to focus and concentrate.

Phase 4 – then at last you rode enough so that riding a bicycle became automatic, you no longer needed to think about what you had to do, you just did it – you were now unconsciously competent at riding a bicycle.

So, to install habits in the quickest manner – its important to know which stage you are in and then concentrate on what you need to do to move to the next stage.

But here’s a question – are you able to ride a bike, arms folded, talk to a friend and go round a bend all at the same time?

In other words can you do several different – yet related things at the same time? Most people would find this difficult – if they hadn’t done them before they would have “to focus and concentrate” on what they were doing until they could do all these things in “tandem” –until then though they would go round the bend with their hands on the handle bars an stop talking!!

The point is significant because until you are able to accommodate all these various related activities any attempt to BE FULLY COMPETENT in time management won’t be accomplished. It means simply being effective from time to time won’t really help you in establishing the habit of effective time management.

Applying the framework to time management

If you are serious about managing time a la Drucker then its as well to realise that

1. there is still parts to being highly effective that you simply don’t know and

2. that your initial goal is to become aware of what really makes up effective behaviour
but even though you have the knowledge you don’t really know yet how to do it yourself

3. that you must consciously choose and then practice the behaviours and work on doing them without even thinking about it so that you achieve consistent time management and often (given the presence of related and unrelated activities).

4. that such practice of relevant activities makes you competent by habit, which should be your goal as a business owner and manager.

Incidentally if you want more on the behaviour and strategies required to achieve high status as an effective time manager – why not e.mail me at andrew@real-results.org and ask for The Vital Habits to Reclaim Time to Achieve More Results. Its yours for the asking.

Being strategic and competent is all about getting the right things done. In order to become a competent strategic business owner and manager you will need to build the habit of effectiveness. No one is born effective so…if you never worked on developing effectiveness skills you are not as competent as you could be, or should be.

Therefore to build the habit of effectiveness you’ll need to practice (consistent practice leads to powerful habits) the 5 skill sets I laid out for you in my last post.

While each skill set is pretty easy to understand, they aren’t so easy to do well. In other words, you will have to build and develop them (they don’t appear like magic), as you’ve had to do with anything else that’s important in your life. You need to practice them over and over again until these 5 skill sets become an integral part of the way you go about doing your work.

Next time I’ll detail how learning and developing habits of effectiveness go hand in hand and the key distinctions you must understand to be successful. If you have applied some of the tasks I have outlined, you should have started to see how much time you’ve been spending on tasks and activities other than on your top priorities.

Just keep up the good work, make sure that you spend as little time (none would be best) multitasking as possible. Stay focused on one task at a time. It’ll be easier to record, and it’s the work process of highly competent business owners and managers.

Keep up the good work, stay focused and notice your patterns, make today a super-productive day.

There are lots of business owners and managers who are quite knowledgeable; however, competent business owners are much, much rarer. Yet it is the competent business owner who succeeds in building successful businesses.

As a business owner – or manager, you and your company make no money for simply knowing. You make money and build your business by getting the right things done.

Just how to decide what are the right things and how to get them done will be the primary focus of the next instalment in this series on the competent business owner and manager Profit Notes.

By highlighting both “WHAT TO DO” and “HOW TO DO IT” you’ll learn (if you follow my lead and spend the few minutes each day these posts require) what you do well, what you need to improve on, what you are currently doing poorly and shouldn’t be doing at all.

You’ll learn where you belong in your business, your niche and your market.

Your first assignment:

1) Take out a sheet of paper or open up a blank mind map.

2) Spend 3 minutes brainstorming what you believe are the skill-sets an entrepreneur must have to be effective.

3) Take 1 minute and rate your current level of performance in these areas.

4) Spend 30 seconds highlighting the areas you believe are your biggest roadblocks to success.

5) Take 2 minutes to answer this questions “What could you do today (realistically) to be more effective?”

(6) Do the one thing you just decided would make you more effective today.

That’s it for now, in the next post I’ll tell you what I believe are the 5 skills every business owner and manager must develop to maximise their competence and truly be a Strategic Owner Manager.

But for today, make sure to do one thing new or different that you believe will make you more effective.

How A Right Hand Can Double Your Profits
As your business begins experiencing growth, it’s vital that you bring on a right-hand man (or woman) to help you in your quest for success. The sooner the better, because when your business is expanding, it’s difficult to take time out to train another person for tasks you need to delegate.

Still, you can’t just bring anyone into the equation. You need to make sure they have the same passion for your business and ideas that you do. How do you achieve that? By compensating them based on their performance or by giving them a percentage of the sales.

Use Performance Incentives
Incentives go a long way in motivating any staff, but with an assistant who works closely with you to realise the ultimate goals of the company, it’s even more valuable as a benefit and reward.

You have to be willing to put all of your trust into this person. You don’t want to worry about what they’ll do or how they’ll go about something. They should always strive to make your company look good in the eyes of your customers and business associates.

The type of person you want to hire on as a right hand man or woman will be highly motivated and able to handle their tasks with minimal input from you once they’ve been instructed on how to do something.

The person should be willing to learn new ideas – and eager to take on more responsibilities in the company. Don’t hire anyone who sits back waiting for an opportunity, or who scoffs at the idea of having to do more work.

Motivate Them With Vision
Your goal is to get them excited about the business – help them recognise the possibilities so that they actively work with you on accomplishing everything the business needs to do to grow and succeed.

Someone once said that recruiting the perfect right hand man is like finding the right suit – they have to fit in just right with the company or else you’ll feel uncomfortable allowing them to handle certain responsibilities.

In a best-case scenario, the right hand man should be able to fill your shoes in any situation – without missing a beat. But this doesn’t mean you have to look for someone exactly like you – in fact, it’s better if his talents and skills complement your own – skills he possesses, you lack, and vice versa.

You have to be careful not to hire someone whose only goal is to replace you within the company – or steal your idea to launch his own business. His loyalty to you should be paramount.

If there are other employees within the company, make sure you hire someone who earns the respect of the others. You can’t have a right hand man who treats your staff with disrespect.

Be Very Selective
You may have to go through several assistants before finding the right fit. You’ll realise that not everyone has what it takes to stand in such an important position. When you do find the right person, you’ll know it – because you’ll instantly feel a sense of relief that your business is on the right track to success.

After finding the right person, the two of you will work in sync to help the business experience growth. Having a right hand man will free up your time so that you can focus on more important tasks.

If he’s good enough at what he does, then you can double up on (or leverage) tactics that show promise in your company’s financial future. If you’re both good copywriters, then you can double the amount of high-converting content you write.

If sales are your strong point, but he’s better at customer service, then divvy up the responsibility for the betterment of the business. You can constantly assess both you and your assistant’s capabilities and leverage each of your skills to their optimum potential.

How To Be More Efficient In The Office
During a typical day in the office, you may waste a few minutes every hour. It may not seem like a lot, until you realise that those minutes can add up to hours. Those are hours you could be spending accomplishing more work or spending at home or in leisure.
Here are ten tips to help you make the most of every moment.

1. Get rid of the muddle in your office. If you’re constantly looking for things amid the junk that’s in your way, you’re wasting time. Get rid of anything that is making your office seem disorderly.

2. Set up an efficient workstation. For example, if you use your filing cabinet often, put it close to the desk so that you don’t have to walk across the room every time you need something. Keep the things you use often near to where you’re seated so that they’re always at your fingertips.

3. Focus on the task at hand. Multi-tasking is sometimes a necessary part of the workday. However, you may find that you’re flitting from one task to the next unnecessarily. Finish your current project before you go on to the next.

4. Keep your email organised. Delete the messages you don’t need and create folders for the ones you do need. That way, when you need to find something, you have a good place to start looking instead of having to filter through hundreds of messages.

5. Keep paper organised. Instead of having to sift through piles of paper on every surface of your office, spend 10 minutes at the end of each day filing away the things you aren’t actively using. If you do need to keep some things out, put them in a vertical file rack that will keep them organised.

6. Delegate tasks. Many business owners and managers have a hard time handing over work. You need to allow your staff to do what they can to free you up for other opportunities. Let your secretary handle phone messages or emails that don’t need your direct attention.

7. Return phone calls right away. Don’t wait for messages to pile up on your desk. Instead of having to spend 10 minutes returning calls, you may spend hours. It’s a lot harder to carve out an hour in your schedule than it is a few minutes each day.

8. Be clear about employee roles. Make sure that everyone understands what his or her tasks really are. Employees should not be duplicating each other’s services. Create standard operating procedures for each position in your company.

9. Create agendas for meetings and use them. Agendas should have time limits and you should assign someone to make sure everyone stays on topic. Keep them as short as possible.

10. Keep one calendar. Either a written or electronic calendar is a must, but you’ll run into problems when you have too many of them. Don’t waste time entering things into multiple planners – just keep one and keep it current.

You’ll find as you get more organised and delegate tasks that it feels like there are suddenly more hours in the day. There’s not – it’s simply the positive result of running your business in the most efficient way possible.

The Ageless Benefits Of Planning
As any successful business person knows, you can kill yourself trying to grow your business. You devote your time and money into your business and throw yourself into it almost without direction until you’ve stretched yourself so thin that you’re no longer productive in any aspect of your work.

“If only I’d planned my time better…!”
By forecasting an orderly work schedule, you’ll preserve both your valuable time and your sanity. Unfortunately, most people start each day off in a fury of tasks and deadlines – without a plan on how to get things done efficiently.

It’s a known fact that you can wear yourself out mentally and physically by tending to the daily tasks your business demands. On the other hand, you can learn how to plan for tomorrow and achieve even greater success – which you can enjoy as it happens.

When people don’t plan, they react to their circumstances – usually in a negative way. How many times have you gone into the office and felt irritated about something someone else has done – or not done and knowing that you’ve got caught up in the here and now – again when you really wanted to work on a fresh initiative?

Do you believe in productivity?
Productivity requires a positive attitude. If you’re always reacting to deadlines, tasks you hadn’t planned on popping up, or other people’s intrusions on your time, then you’ll be too hindered in the hassle of it all to make formidable decisions that will help drive your profits upward.

There has to be a fine balance between planning your day and being flexible enough to handle the unexpected. After all it would terrible to have every minute of your day scheduled and then find that something has thrown it off balance.
Planning shouldn’t paralyse activity but serve as a guide – a path – to help you get from point A to point B.

And planning doesn’t require a lot of time either. You simply have to plan the time to think. This means planning how you spend your time in advance. So planning should take place the day, week, month and quarter before in line with your annual plan. In this way you’ll be better able to schedule your time when you’re more aware of your company’s immediate needs.
Make a comprehensive to-do list. That doesn’t mean every single thing will get done the next day, but you want to have it on paper so that you’ll be able to give it attention at some point.

The vital importance of the “Top Three”
A vital practice is the Top Three. In other words of all the things on your list to do, what are the three you have to do to-day. Twenty priorities mean no priorities. If you want to achieve focus and concentrate your energy and effort then the Top Three is a very, very valuable practice.

Make a quick estimate of how much time each task in a plan of action will take – to give yourself an idea of how long it will take you to complete that single item on your to-do list.
The reason for this is when you fail to meet your self-imposed deadlines; it can create even more stress than if you had simply worked without a plan in place. While you might want to be Superman for a day, it won’t always happen – things are bound to present themselves as obstacles to your success.

If there are more people connected to the company – from employees to contracted labor – define their roles within the company structure so that some of the tasks can be designated for them to handle. This whole subject of delegation is something special – and we’ll look at that another time.

Putting a value on time
But here’s the rub; as you create each task, determine what it would cost for you to complete it. For instance, if your time is worth £100/hour, and you’re wasting an hour filling out forms that someone else could do for £8/hour, then you’re losing £92 an hour in profit.
Your time needs to be planned out so that you are maximizing your talents but also doing tasks that will have the highest return for your investment of each and every hour. Adding to the above example, your hour could have been used to develop an ad campaign that results in a high conversion rate of traffic to your website.

Don’t forget to add personal goals and time to your schedule. You want it to be flexible enough so that if there’s a family emergency, or if you simply need a break from it all, you won’t throw the entire business into a tailspin just because you’re not physically or mentally involved with the business 24-hours a day.

What would you do with £100,000?
Time is an irreplaceable asset. Yet we tend to spend it wildly – and, as I once did, making most of my decisions on the hoof. An advantage of planning is that we do get to choose what we do with our time. Imagine winning £100,000 and thinking about what you would want to do with it. You’d actually spend some time thinking that through, wouldn’t you? It’s the same with planning. It’s important to take some time out to plan where we investment our money, time and effort.

Greetings! As I’m about to launch another coaching programme, I thought I’d let you know, I’m releasing an extensive report that outlines some of the basic principles I teach.

Over the past 18 months or so we have been working with a wide range of business owners with a special business development programme. The results that we have achieved have been outstanding!

Clients are achieving 30% increases in sales and another is on the way to a 50% increase in turnover!

These results combined with the insights that we have drawn from our own research now form the basis of our ‘Ultimate Business Manifesto’ – to be launched in December. This ground breaking document reveals DEEP insights into many business owners’ personal approaches to business, and what they need to CHANGE in order to be (more) successful.

We are also putting together a short workshop programme based on our Manifesto which we call “Discover Profits that Lie Hidden in Your Business” to show business owners the vital skills needed to achieve greater success.

If you’re interested in learning more about what goes on “behind the curtain” in my elite coaching groups, please e-mail me on andrew@uniquebusinesssolutions.co.uk