Productivity Tips to Help Small Business Entrepreneurs Succeed

15 Productivity Tips to Help Small Business Entrepreneurs Succeed

‘Your Future Is Created By What You Do Today’

Yes! Your future actually depends on luck and your productivity.

Starting something new is always great you know!

The first school in your life, first bike ride in your life, even first homework that you had done wrong over and over. Isn’t it? But at the very first time, someone helped you to understand all those terms so that things become easier to you.

Similarly, Starting and running a business successfully is an excellent way to make money.

 Every business needs hard work, management, and negotiation skills, and much more. 

Focus on being productive instead of busy.

So, What is productivity in business?

Productivity is a very important attribute for getting maximum work done in minimum time. It is one of those important things every businessman needs mastery over to grow his/ her business faster.

True leaders know the great deal of productivity that comes out of strong self-esteem.

They help others to develop this esteem so that productivity can increase gradually.

Here are a few small business productivity tips to help small entrepreneurs start making it big by wasting a minimum amount of time:

Make Daily Plan to Keep Your Task Prioritize

Prioritize your task, Productivity Tips for small business

“Achievers always work from a clear sense of priority”

We all know the importance of starting a day by eating a healthy breakfast. A proper breakfast provides your body with the fuel it needs to function a whole day.

A daily plan is your chance to figure out-

  • How you typically spend your time
  • When you are most productive
  • How your routine affects your daily life

Always try to prepare a daily checklist with the most important tasks on the top. Start your day with the most important one. Set your minimum goals, prepare your work plan to measure every step of what you should do, what you need to finish today, and how you will distribute recent work to your employees.

 Even you should keep ready for the next day’s plan. Make a planning schedule for what you will do next day and the part you will try to finish. 

Nevertheless, keep a daily plan if you want to become a successful entrepreneur from the very beginning.

Set Realistic Goals That Achievable

Realistic goals are strategic goals with certain characteristics that help you easily achieve them. 

As an example, let’s take an unrealistic goal of yours is going to a planet, it could be- mars. Why is it unrealistic?

 Because you don’t know how you are going to do it, you have no knowledge, resources, or a plan on how you are going to do it. You can make it realistic by planning the detailed steps on how you are going to do it.

A simple example of a realistic goal will be gathering the knowledge for it.

  First, can you read?

  Which book will you be reading?

  Is it really what you want to do?

  Why do you want to do it?

If you are clear about what and why you want to do it. You should start by planning how many chapters/pages you will read in a day or week or month.

What makes it a realistic goal? You know why, when, and what you are doing. To make a goal realistic, you need to have a detailed plan and enough information about what you want. 

Take your goal as a semester project and divide it into parts, and then further divide those parts into sub-parts until you get a list of milestones. 

If you can divide your goals into milestones, it is a realistic goal. You can use spreadsheets, sticky notes, notepad, or anything you think will assist you during the process.

You have to find out what’s right for you. So, it’s a trial or error.

You are going to be alright if you accept realistic and flexible goals for you.

Focus on what you want to do in your future, don’t try to go right to the top in one leap. Every time you accomplish a goal you develop the strength and wisdom to accomplish the next one.

The goal you set must be challenging, must be hard to carry, But at the end of the day think about your success. Your small types of productivity can help you achieve your goals.

When you complete something small or big, you find happiness from it.

Leverage Your Free Time And Flexibility

Your success will be in direct proportion to how you spend your ‘free’ time.

High productivity comes from leveraging your free time by doing only the most important things.

We all heard that “ Time is money”

So, manage your time wisely, either it’s free time or working time. It doesn’t matter at all.

Small businesses have a huge advantage to change quickly to adapt to market demand and trends with little effort.

Improvement is the key to success. So, Try to learn, read, or implement them in your free time. 

The day you stop learning is the day you stop producing good stuff.

Try to be productive to improve your skills, capability, and most importantly find everything related to your success in your business. 

Block Distractions That Harm Your Productivity

I guess the entrepreneur journey is one of the hardest times.

However, anyone can tell you to follow your passion….. Work for it, but nobody will teach you to block your distractions.

So far, your business can be profitable and rewarding, at the same time it can also take everything from you if you are distracted. 

And when it’s all about a startup or a small business, many of you don’t even know about the things that can hamper your business.

 “Stop getting distracted by the things that have nothing to do with your goals”

So, what types of distractions do you need to block when it matters to your success?

  • Mistakes you have made
  • Unnecessary message alert
  • Unnecessary gossip

We make mistakes every day in our life. And when we make it, we can’t focus on our other works properly. 

 If you are focusing on your mistakes, you aren’t dedicating the mental energy to your business.

So, learn from your mistakes, but don’t waste your time with that mistake. If you really want to be productive in any way, you have to block those distractions that are harmful.

No one succeeds overnight. Take your time.

Hire an Assistant

Here is another set of productivity tips for you… Have you ever had anyone tell you that you need to hire an assistant?

Well, I mentioned earlier that you should leverage your free time.  

 If you don’t have free time how could you plan for your business, how could you organize the system, policy and others that need to grow your small business?

Remember one thing… Being an entrepreneur, You must have to be productive. So it’s high time to hire an assistant who will manage tasks that you have planned and improve yourself as a planner. 

Your productivity saves time, reduces costs, and utilizes other staff.

Hire an assistant who will perform tasks like- your project deadlines, store your client details, Schedule meetings, and appointments, acknowledge and respond to customer emails, appointment setting, and other important stuff. 

Keep Your Email Clean 

The majority of your productivity hampers your ability when you concentrate on unnecessary communications.  

it’s important to keep things organized. 

 So, how can you keep it organized?

    • Move important and unimportant emails to a folder of their own.
    • Highlight or set priority to certain addresses. For example, a rule could be created to highlight any user in your address book.
    • Filter out common spam words that get into your inbox 
    • In programs that support rules, mark messages that are not important to keep your inbox clean and prevent you from getting overwhelmed when you first open email.
    • If you are getting lots of spam, filter your email.
    • unsubscribe unnecessary email

Use Project Management Software 

Trying to manage a project without project management is like trying to play a football game without a game plan

Quality project management software will help you to be productive and keep everyone involved in the project up to date, in real-time. Which actually helps to manage-

  • Team collaboration features
  • File sharing and storage
  • Accountability towards goals and tasks
  • Task management features

The best project management and collaboration tools help to solve this problem by incorporating file sharing and storage right within the software. Each project can have its own section for storing files, so you can access them easily anytime, anywhere. The best tools will also help eliminate manual reporting and generate reports automatically.

Some best project management software and tools are-  ProofHub , Workzone ,  Slack    and you will find more on the internet.

Set Deadlines For Your Work

Maximum startup companies are unable to stay in the marketplace for so long. 

Do you ever think about it, Why?

Well, They always have lack of knowledge about business, entrepreneurship, cost, profit, and more business terms. They just think, oh! I need more money and I have some savings. I should open a business to earn extra money.

Do you think they will stay long?

It’s quite hard. Without proper business knowledge, you can’t go far.

So set your working deadline as early as possible. Keep your client’s project deadline more clear to them. 

Show them you are more flexible than others. Setting project deadlines can improve your business lifestyle as well.

Use Automation

The ability to automate processes marked a significant shift in the ability to increase manufacturing productivity and quality.  Finding ways to automate tasks can also help you increase your productivity and effectiveness at work and in life.

Benefits of automation include:

  • Freeing up time and attention
  • Predictably and reliably executing common activities
  • Reducing the risk of important things falling through the cracks
  • Reducing stress related to trying to remember and task management
  • Getting more done

Now think outside the box! You need to use those things that help to reduce waste time.

How much time and energy would you save if you automated tasks with automation?

Try to find out which types of automation do you need in your business.

If you are running a bookselling business, you should choose relatable automation. There’s no need to use automation which is made for a poultry firm, right?

If you use unrelated automation for your business, it’s a waste!

Use Smart Communication Tools

Can your business survive without communication?

52% said that poor communication added significant stress to their workday and 44% percent said that a lack of clear communication led to delays or failure to complete projects.

We need to communicate with our client, employees , even with a person we met just now. 

Right?

So, communication is a must.

By simply better connecting with employees, organizations can increase productivity by 25%.

and there are many ways to connect with your team and engage them.

Slack, Facebook, Webchat, Email are the best options to communicate with your client and employees.

Using an email you can easily communicate, notify something important as emails are delivered extremely fast when compared to traditional posts. Emails can be sent 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Take advantage to develop your email communication and make yourself productive.

It’s a kind of productivity you express to your clients as you continuously send them news, confirmation and basically you try to build up your level of communication through those platforms.

Take challenges

“Life is about accepting the challenges along the way, choosing to keep moving forward, and savoring the journey.”

Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart 

My biggest motivation to myself was challenging myself. 

I saw my life almost like a survivor.

Every day I learned something, I changed myself, I tried to think productively. And now, here I am. 

Don’t be afraid to take on big challenges. They give the best rewards.

Challenges are gifts that force us to search for a new center of gravity. We don’t grow when things are easy, we grow when we face challenges more and more. 

 Being a productive person, you have to focus on new tasks, new trends, and most importantly your productivity. 

 Success is an option, you just need to adapt the knowledge of how you can grow your small and startup business more productively. 

Motivate The Team

Motivation is the driving force behind productivity. It’s what makes your team members get up in the morning, go to the office and start serving your clients with a smile on their face.

When setting your business on the path of productivity, it’s important to create visible plans.

Additionally, you can measure productivity at both an individual and team level for greater insight into the current state of things. After that, you have a starting point to begin implementing strategies to motivate your employees.

When people find out that you’re productive, you’re flexible with your goal as a business owner, they will be motivated.

So, motivate your team with your productivity and positivity. 

Talk to them, help them understand what you want from them, what changes your team members can make them more productive.

The strength of each of the team is each individual member,

The strength of each member is the team

Find a group of people who challenge and inspire you, spend a lot of time with them, and it will change your life forever. Understanding your employee’s perspective can go a long way towards increasing productivity and happiness.

Stop Multitasking

Multitasking arises out of distraction itself.

How multitasking destroys your productivity?

Let’s start with the big one: your brain.

Ever write your blog posts while watching TV? Sitting in on a conference call? Listening to the chatter in the open office? You’re asking your brain to split its attention and it can’t do that. Our brains are not efficient at focusing on multiple tasks at once. They simply aren’t. We think they are, but what’s happening in your brain is jumping back and forth between the tasks, focusing briefly one at a time.

And not only can our brains not make it happen, but they get damaged when we try to force them.

Multitasking lowers the qualities of your work, reduces the ability to make connections, damage your productivity, and sometimes makes you dumb.

Studies have found that multitasking reduces your productivity by 40%

By focusing on the things that are really important, you’ll be much more productive than your multitasking co-workers. Using new time-management strategies for balancing a more demanding workload will help you achieve much more in the same amount of time.

Excuses Holding You Back From the Success

Make an effort, not an excuse.”

Why I’m saying that to you?

I’m always listening to these words from people- I don’t have the time, I’ll do it later, I’m not prepared enough and many more disappointing things….

But isn’t it easy to focus on productive efficiency?

We can use bullet journal or any journal from the internet to prioritize our works, we can make our mindset to say “I’ve to do this right now!”, find a way to prepare it as early as possible. 

That’s called Positive Mind.

99% of the failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses.

So, stop making excuses.

Nobody is busy, it’s a matter of your priorities.

Reduce Stress, Relax!

Why relaxation is good for health?

There are a lot of good reasons to do so, including heart and mood wellness, increased productivity, and possibly even cancer prevention.

 Relaxation can give you focus and confidence to make it through a stressful day, and even help you be more productive.

Take a break from your desk.

Look for patterns to improve a healthy lifestyle, clear your anxiety, practice mindfulness, take quality sleep, promote a healthy work-life balance.

Regular relaxation delivers many scientifically proven benefits,

It helps reduce anxiety, improve productivity, enhanced immunity and a productive mind will help you to make a big success in your life.

Sometimes the biggest gain in productive energy comes from cleaning a desk!
It’s not necessary everyone is smart. If you find someone who is not smart enough then you but more productive, then remember one thing that……. He is more successful than you.

So, focus on being productive instead of busy. If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door of success with your productivity. Read my another blog to learn details about entrepreneurial success to grow a small business

Final Verdict

Sometimes, things may not go your way, but the effort should be there every single night.

Your focus for a single work is a reflection of your future. Don’t waste your opportunities. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.

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