>>>What gets measured gets managed
Biz, and life more broadly is all about growth. When it comes to the women I work with, solopreneurs who want to reenergise their biz and live a life they love, one of the obstacles to their growth (professional and personal) is their productivity. They’re busy, no doubt about that, but they’re spinning their wheels. They’re busy but not achieving, and as we know, busy doesn’t equate to productivity!
The issue these women face is not that they don’t know how to work hard. They do. However, they don’t necessarily work smart. They’re so caught up in the day-to-day that they don’t have the headspace to consider if there are more effective and efficient ways to work. They have a desired outcome (ie their goals) but they don’t know how to either be more efficient or to find the optimal way to do something, which may actually be handballing it. They’re exhausted at the end
of each day, but haven’t made any obvious momentum on their goals and they can’t actually account for how the hours slipped by.
I have a simple solution - of course I do - but before that, here’s a couple of roadblocks to productivity that I see time and time again with the women I coach.
The first is a bulging to do list with too many competing priorities. These women show me a to do list where everything has the same level of importance. There’s lots of ‘work’ tasks but nothing really that aligns to what will move the goal posts. Progress is not all equal. There’s deep work that achieves and then there’s superficial work that sucks up time and energy. Guess which their daily action sheet reveals?
The second big one is an online environment intrinsically built to suck us in. I read recently that the average working adult spends over 2 hours during the working day on a platform - 2 hours! I truly believe that self-control isn’t necessarily the solution here. These are sophisticated systems that are known to be addictive and are built to distract you though chasing their dopamine hit. There are ways however to minimise your exposure and protect your time, such as setting designated times to respond to emails, turning off notification pings across all devices and maybe even consider removing social media from your phone altogether, so your time on the platforms is scheduled and intentional.
Roadblocks out of the way - here’s one of the ways I help women reclaim their time to build real momentum towards their business goals: a time data log.
A time data log is one of my favourite strategies. It measures the day in thirty minute increments to see how time is being utilised and where it’s being misappropriated. It’s basically a time management tool to help you become more efficient, effective and productive in all the right ways. It offers invaluable insights. It will show you what time of the day you felt most in flow, what helped you get into flow state (such as using the Pomodoro technique, working in a cafe or wearing noise-cancelling headphones) and how you felt at the end of the day. As you track you’ll find patterns of when you were in peak performance and when you would have been better served with pressing pause. A time data log will make it more obvious where you can work smarter, where you could apply task batching to your day and where you can increase productivity and performance.
Knowing how you spend your time is powerful. This can help you be ferocious with how you manage your time, it can give you insights into how long you need to complete a task (which in turn can help you invoice more appropriately) and it will help you streamline your business systems and processes. On the other side of this data is the ability to apply my delegation strategy of Done by Me, Outsourced/Delegated and Stop against all the tasks and activities needed to run your biz and achieve your goals. When you pair this knowledge with the data from your budgets and financials you can be in a clearer position to assess the profitability of your business and then set goals and your daily action list accordingly.
There are a ton of apps out there for logging your time but I like to keep things simple with a tick-a-box spreadsheet. This also makes it really easy to share information with your business coach - hey, that’s me! If you’d like a chat about how I can be of support, please reach out. Let’s get you working effectively and efficiently!
My business tagline is "Reenergise your biz | live a life you love. Let's focus on bringing back joy in everything we do.
Speaking of joy, the countdown is on, there here are only five weeks until Christmas. Time to review your wishlist before you sign off for 2023? If you are looking for clarity and guidance in setting vision & goals for the first quarter of 2024, reach out, I would love to support you.
I am on a mission to help you discover the potential within yourself to dream, plan and take action on the life you want to live.
Feel free to book in for a complimentary 20 min Discovery Call to see if we are a good fit to work together.