Years ago when I started my business I was stuck in that daily grind of emails and appointments that I simply couldn’t get out of. They all felt important but only a few items actually pushed my business forward. The rest was just busy work. It took me instituting 3 things to get my time back and start pushing the truly important projects forward. Today I want to share those 3 things with you so you can start putting your focus on the right things in your life.
1. Say NO.
This is the most important aspect of getting more productive without burning out. Before you move on to the other things in the list you need to make sure that you’re focused on the right things in your life. Last week I had 3 people I know invite me for coffee. I could have said yes, but my real focus is packing a house to move and getting ready for a month-long vacation. Because the important tasks of my week didn’t leave room for going out with friends, I told them to get in touch with me after my vacation. It’s so easy to want to please a new prospect in business, but before you worry about pleasing them you need to ask yourself if you should even be working with them. Just because someone wants to work with you or sends you an email doesn’t mean that you need to work with them or respond to the email. That request is simply an indication of what they think is important for you to use your time on. If that prospect doesn’t fit with your current business focus, tell them you can’t work with them. If you get emails asking for your time on things that don’t fit with your current focus, politely decline the opportunity. Your default answer to any inquiry for your time needs to become “no.” Start with no and then evaluate how the request matches up with your focus. Only change the no to a yes when it matches up with your focus. Staying focused on the few things we really should be doing is the best way to keep us energized while making sure that we don’t have a deluge of busy work stealing our attention from what matters.
2. Delegate.
Unfortunately, despite your best efforts there are always going to be some things you can’t say no to. Maybe it’s your taxes. Few people enjoy doing them or are gifted in tax prep, but it’s something we have to do or we can expect the tax agency to come visit you. Despite having to get my taxes done, I’ve never done them even in a year when I made $8k for 12 months. I paid someone to submit my taxes for me. I don’t even enter my day-to-day receipts; I’ve delegated that to my assistant. Do you need to set up your weekly email to your email list? Once the content is written, someone else can do the busy work of setting it up in your email marketing software. Your time is more effective spent writing more content. If you have any repetitive tasks, delegate them. It’s going to take investment up front to build the training material, but then you don’t have to touch that task again. Getting these tasks out of your list means you can stay focused on the things that you do best.
3. Automate.
A close cousin to delegation is automation. In fact some people say that before you look at delegation you should be looking at automation because if you can automate a task, it means you don’t need to delegate it. I use this with my invoicing software 17hats and their “workflows.” Instead of taking a few minutes at the beginning of every project to write the same email and send it, I now just let 17hats take care of the project intro email for me. Zapier is another great tool to automate easy repetitive things. You could use Zapier to push your email receipts off to Evernote for long term storage and the person you have entering your business receipts. Investing a few dollars a month in Zapier can save you hours of time a month in repetitive tasks. What tasks do you do regularly that can be automated? Do you send essentially the same email to every client at the beginning of a project? Save it in a tool like TextExpander and never write it again. With these three tools in under your belt, you can cut so many of the things that steal your focus. Stop doing things over and over, and instead, automate. What you can’t automate, delegate to someone who can do it better or cheaper. Most importantly, do a serious evaluation of what you’re doing and make your default answer to new requests “no.” Only say yes to opportunities that you’re passionate about and fit in with your focus. Doing these three things is going to give you new energy in your life as you only need to focus on the things that matter most to you. Featured photo credit: pedrosimoes7 via flickr.com
