I believe that entrepreneurs can, and often do, solve the world’s most complex problems.
In my opinion, this is directly linked to problem solving skills all entrepreneurs hone and develop as part of chasing the entrepreneur dream. Specifically, some of the skills include:
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- Critical Thinking…
- Creativity/ Lateral Thinking. …
- Initiative…
- Persistence…
- Flexibility/Adaptability….
- Self-Discipline…
So, given such facts, I thought we talk about some of the ways (7 to be exact) that smart entrepreneurs use to work less and get more done.
1. Create a schedule:
First and foremost, successful entrepreneurs use a schedule.
Think about it for a minute…
When you have a daily schedule, you know what you’re going to get done that day.
So guess what? It’s easier to get things done when you have it on your schedule.
This is an excellent approach to planning the major goals you want to accomplish.
I’ve heard of entrepreneurs who once a quarter perform a “time audit” on their personal and business life.
The audit basically tells them where they are spending their time and whether they are getting the most value of the time being spent.
Creating a schedule can also help you retrospectively check if your actions map to the major goals you’re trying to accomplish.
For instance, if one of your major goal is to get a 100k subscribers on your company’s YouTube channel, you’ll start with 2 fundamental questions:
1. How can I accomplish it?
2. What actions will I take to constantly map to this goal?
Perhaps you decide to do competitive research Youtube on a daily to give you a better handle on what competitors are doing to increase their subscribers.
Based on this research, you then update your video titles, descriptions, and even the thumbnails.
Or even research new story ideas to then map out a schedule of what videos to produce and publish on Youtube.
You may even find yourself adjusting your daily schedule to directly map to achieving the 100k subscriber goal.
The bottom line is that you should know what you’re going to do when you wake up every day.
And with a schedule that is on point and guiding you towards your a “big picture goals,” you’re much more likely to be successful.
2. Batch similar tasks together.
This one can literally be a life saver.
You will be so pleasantly surprise to see how much of your time is saved when you batch similar tasks together.
Simply put, batching means that anything you’re doing multiple times per day, you put together into one big chunk and just do it once per day.
Or if you are doing something multiple times per week, or per month, put these together and get it done in during one week of the month or during one month of the year.
The more you can batch similar tasks, the more successful you’ll be at getting more stuff done.
So as an example, in publishing blog posts for KORE co-working, our goal is to write 2 blog posts per week and 8 per month.
So rather than doing 1 blog post on the day we have to publish, we may take the Sunday of the week to write 8 blog posts for one month worth of content.
Then, we can put that on a posting schedule and release the posts on the dates we want our readers to consume to content.
3. Get Your Team Together
As an entrepreneur, you want to do everything on your own, but you obviously know you CAN NOT.
Of course, when you first start out, you may have not choice but to try and do everything yourself. This could be partly due to lack of resources.
But as soon as you are able to, and can afford it, start building your team!
Bring other talent on board. It will be so worth it.
Here’s another way to look at why you should focus on getting your team together…
More than likely, you have that one “genius level talent” where you truly excel.
This is probably “that thing” which brings the most value to your venture. This is the “working on your business” item (or set of items) that can propel you to another level.
However, because you don’t have a team, you are forced to spend 90% of your time “working in your business” rather than “on it.”
The more you can delegate the “working in your business tasks” to others (that probably are better than you and it, and maybe even enjoy it more), the more successful you will be.
I’ll leave you with one thought for this item. And that is…
If you want to go far in your venture, you can’t go it alone. You need a team. So, start looking at who is around you that you can bring on board to take some of those “working in your business” tasks off your plate.
You can then focus on “working on the business” using your genius level talent.
4. Know What to Work On
Before you sit down and let your fingers touch the keyboard, you should know exactly what you are going to do.
This is one of those “to dos” that will immediately increase your productivity.
It will help you better deal with the relentless dopamine fix you get from checking your social media and email accounts.
So before you even open your laptop, ask yourself, what am I going to accomplish and what do I need to do to accomplish it?
Following this very simple advice will stop you from wasting your precious time.
You may not realize it… but spending 5 minutes here and there, checking your social media accounts and “surfing” the web, leads procrastination. And, it can prevent you from getting the important things done.
5. Eliminate
At the onset of this post, we mentioned an idea of performing quarterly audit of your schedule to see where your time is going.
What you’ll discover from this audit will serve as the input to the Eliminate step.
In your time audit, you will undoubtedly find tasks you should not be doing anymore.
This could be anything from spending time preparing and publishing a report no one is reading, to spending your work time watching Youtube MMA videos.
You are the only one who knows what you need to eliminate…
The bottom list is that, more likely than not, you are doing things in your day to day that is not adding value. If you can find these “things” and eliminate them, you will “magically create” a chunk of time you didn’t think existed.
6. Automate
Okay, so once you have eliminated the stuff keeping your productivity down, the next thing to do is to look to automate.
This is especially true for repetitive tasks that a computer program can do. So, when you find yourself doing something on your computer repeatedly, ask yourself “can this be automated?”
Or, is there a software tool out there already that can help me with this? Or, who can I hire to write a program to automate this thing I find myself doing over and over?
7. Do work that you love
Although this is such a “DUH” tip, you’ll be surprise how many entrepreneurs get caught up in doing the things they don’t love to do.
The fact is that when you work on stuff you love to do, you are way more productive…
You are way more creative…
And, you create much better output!