Time management skills and external obligations have been known to be directly linked to productivity. What many professionals don’t know is that your habits also have a direct impact on your productivity.
Regardless of how well you plan out your long-term and short-term goals, ensuring that every activity is carried out effectively and efficiently while rejecting distractions and intrusions, is an important step.
When running a business, it is easy to ignore the small habits that bite into your time. The assumption that taking a few minutes every day to indulge in these small habits won’t affect your general productivity is a dangerous notion for business professionals and entrepreneurs.
The value of these negligible minutes adds up to a significant number of hours that can be felt weekly, monthly, and even yearly. When studying the efficiency and productivity of the year, the collective minutes or hours allocated to these small habits could have been utilized effectively to improve your business’ performance.
Let’s explore 5 small habits that secretly affect your productivity.
- Failing to Plan Your Day
Many times, you may want to wing it. Take the day as it comes. When thinking of facing your daily challenges by writing it out and planning ahead with specific time blocks, you may choose to forgo this part of your day and attend to activities as they come.
This small habit has a much larger impact on your productivity than you can fathom. This is because by failing to plan your day ahead, you cannot organize and prioritize your daily activities; therefore, not being as productive as you can and need to be.
This leads to overwhelm, postponed tasks, lack of focus, multiple intrusions, and distractions that greatly affect your productivity and overall efficiency.
- Continuously Checking Your Emails
Emailing is one of the preferred choices of communication amongst businesses and their clients, partners, and suppliers alike. Due to its ability to instantly search and receive messages, emails remain a trusted mode of communication to keep you informed at all times.
The challenge business professionals face with emails is that continuously checking emails has become a habit that chews a lot of your very valuable time. Sometimes, you can spend hours searching and refreshing your emails and responding to emails and messages. Doing this continuously has a negative impact on your productivity.
Though it is important to be informed, utilize an important time management skill like time blocking to help you check your emails and function optimally. Section an hour or a few minutes of your day to check your emails. This can be done either once in the morning, around 11:00 and then around 4:00pm to be on top of your inbox.
Doing this helps you focus on more important tasks and significantly improves your productivity.
- Checking Social Media
Social media is now more than a way to view memes, gifs, and videos. It has transformed into a platform that benefits businesses at every turn, when managed properly.
As an entrepreneur, you may be handling your social media by yourself.
The only challenge with this is that checking your social media can be a slippery slope. You may open any of your platforms to reply to a message or just to take a look at your insights or performance for a minute.
This can quickly devolve into hours of watching funny videos, liking posts, and jumping from page to page, and one attraction to another.
Instead of doing this, simply turn off all your social media notifications and put your phone out of sight. When you do this, you can focus on the most important high payoff tasks you have to handle.
Strictly follow the allotted time block when you handle your social media services. Once the time allotted is up, put your device away or close the apps or tabs and turn your focus to other tasks. This will help you improve your productivity.
If you are the only one to do social media marketing, time block when you will do this activity. I recommend not during prime time, of course. Ideally, you can hire this activity to someone else.
- Planning Without Time Blocks
Time blocking is revered as one of the essential time management skills due to its efficiency and ease of use. Time blocking deals with scheduling tasks in specific hours of the day and undertaking them only during their scheduled time frames.
When you plan without time blocks, there is a higher chance that your one task may not get done or may extend through hours of the day which will cause delayed tasks and outright cancellations of important decisions that may affect your business.
Planning without time blocks strictly affects your organization and time management skills that negatively impact your business’ performance. Everyone in your firm needs to be good at time blocking their tasks and activities and it will make everyone even more productive.
For more on time blocking, check out an article I wrote by going to https://www.accountabilitycoach.com/how-to-increase-your-business-efficiency-with-calendar-time-blocks/.
- Planning Long Meetings
To improve productivity and keep your eyes on your goals, it is important to plan meetings to understand each team’s activities towards achieving the organization’s goals.
Meetings also help you inform your employees of new decisions, update them on important notices and changes that affect their activities, and keep you updated on other items.
The challenges businesses face with planning long meetings are that:
- Most of the items can be attended to in one email
- It leaves employees feeling drained and uninterested
- Simply planning long meeting takes valuable time
- Long meetings consume valuable time and have a huge impact on productivity
Optimize your time by utilizing short, stand-up huddles to inform your employees and receive crucial feedback. People can’t get too comfortable when they are standing up. It will help to make the meetings short and to the point. Come to each meeting with a very specific agenda and have team members bring an agenda, so time is utilized effectively.
To download my complimentary meeting agenda and action item worksheet template, go to https://bit.ly/MeetingAgendaActionsTemplate.
Getting rid of these small habits that negatively impact your productivity can set you on a path to success faster. Cut out one habit every week to see its impact on your productivity and the team’s productivity in a short time.
For more help on increasing your productivity and your firm’s productivity, reach out to me today to schedule your complimentary consultation.
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Do you feel like your business has plateaued or you are sick and tired of being sick and tired? Could you use a shot in the arm to make even more progress on your goals? Consider working with The Accountability Coach. I’m here to help you accelerate your results, so you can enjoy your ideal business and ideal life!
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