Business owners thrive on productivity tips. As an entrepreneur, you have a lot of things on your plate, making it difficult to stay focused and prioritize important tasks. This is where taking action to improve your productivity can make a big difference. Today you will explore 10 productivity tips for entrepreneurs along with some useful tools to implement right away.
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How Can an Entrepreneur Improve Productivity?
There are several ways for entrepreneurs to boost productivity, manage time, and get more things done. The following list will give you some interesting ideas, just choose the ones that resonate the most with your lifestyle and start taking action today!
#1: Become a note-taking pro
Taking notes is a surefire way of keeping important information in your head. Indeed, taking notes allows you to remember important facts and make sense of the world around you. Entrepreneurs can benefit from note-taking in meetings and seminars but also on the go when new ideas arrive. Brain dumps, for example, are another example of note-taking that can immensely boost your focus:
Productivity tools like Evernote or Google Keep are great to keep your notes organized and accessible from all your devices. Both are note-taking apps with diverse organization systems and styles. On the other hand, if you happen to be the analogic type, just keep a dedicated note-taking notebook always near you!
#2: Create to-do lists
Creating to-do lists is one of the oldest productivity tips for entrepreneurs out there. However, its validity always endures. Keeping to-do lists is very useful, especially for business owners who usually have a lot of things on their plate and must juggle several tasks at a time. Indeed, to-do lists allow you to break down overwhelming tasks into manageable pieces and distribute them over the week or month.
There are literally hundreds of apps that allow you to create to-do lists, but Todoist is one of the most complete ones. It has a very beautiful interface that is also intuitive, with options like adding recurring tasks and sorting tasks by diverse views, among other features. Additionally, you can access your to-do lists from diverse devices. However, you can always stick to the pen and paper method if you prefer.
#3: Exercise time management
When you create to-do lists, it’s also important to manage when to perform each task and prioritize accordingly. For scheduling deadlines, meetings, and other important dates, calendars are great and entrepreneurs’ best time management asset.
Google Calendar is one of the most known calendar apps. It allows you to view your calendar from diverse devices, add reminders automatically from Gmail, and see your schedule in an aesthetically pleasing way. On the other hand, Calendly is a different option, but also great to manage your time. It allows other people to see your available dates and book a meeting or register for an event. It basically eliminates the need of emailing back and forth with someone to set a meetup.
#4: Monitor your habits
If you feel like hours are never enough to get done what you need to get done, it may be time to start monitoring your habits. What can be prioritized? What can you eliminate? Are certain habits stealing precious time from you?
With apps like RescueTime, it’s easy to see where your time is going. The app allows you to monitor how much you focus and what is distracting you. Additionally, you receive special guidance and recommendations to better manage your time and achieve your focus goal for the day.
#5: Get the necessary amount of rest
Something that entrepreneurs commonly forget is the importance of rest. While it appears that if you sleep less you can get more done, actually the opposite is true. A proper night’s rest allows your body to prepare for another busy day and your mind to be sharp and active.
And since sleep is so important for productivity, you can use tools like Sleep Cycle to help you track and analyze your sleep. This tool recommends an optimal time to go to bed and a perfect time in your sleep cycle to wake up to feel refreshed and rested.
On the other hand, OFFTIME is great to get quality offline time. An essential part of resting involves disconnecting from digital devices to clean your mind and walk away from day-to-day distractions and overall chaos. Indeed, OFFTIME allows you to disconnect from your smartphone and wind down for the day or get quality time with family and friends.
#6: Energize yourself, mentally and physically
As we covered in the last point, resting from work is one of the most essential productivity tips for entrepreneurs. Although at first it may seem counterintuitive, our brain needs time to rest and recharge to achieve full focus.
Meditating helps you calm your thoughts and create a blank slate where concentration can happen. Calm, with its varied meditations for different purposes, allows you to get a productive rest to recharge your mind. On the other hand, exercising allows your mind to get a break while your body energizes at the same time. You can use tools like Fitbit to achieve this purpose, motivating you to work out and monitoring your health.
#7: Develop your network
Surrounding yourself with other business owners and entrepreneurs is great for bouncing off ideas and discovering new strategies for your business. Considering that “you’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with” (something that you’ve probably heard countless times) including people with entrepreneurial mindsets in your life can do wonders for productivity.
For this, you can find groups of entrepreneurs in your area or join online communities for entrepreneurs. It will help you not only to develop your professional network but also to get accountability and be more productive.
???? Connect with like-minded entrepreneurs
Rising Tide Society is a community that gathers thousands of entrepreneurs and small business owners worldwide to provide resources and connections for them to scale and grow their businesses. You can join for free and participate in diverse networking and learning events.
#8: Remove distractions
Removing distractions and focusing on one thing at a time is essential to being productive. Additionally, it allows you to get in a flow state and quickly move on to the next task. However, it’s difficult nowadays to ignore the countless distractions we have within easy reach.
Freedom is an app designed to help you focus on what matters. This tool allows you to block annoying websites, mobile apps, and other distractions (such as games) that derail your productivity. On the other hand, tools like Focus To-Do (a Pomodoro timer and task manager) allow you to stay focused on specific time slots, introducing brief breaks to keep your mind sharp.
#9: Automate and delegate
Automating takes time, but it may save you numerous hours once you have the systems set up. Especially for businesses, automating with tools such as Zapier can make a big difference, allowing you to concentrate on growth and ditch the time-consuming day-to-day operations.
At the same time, you need to prioritize. Of those tasks you can’t automate, what can you delegate? This will also help you save time to be more productive on what matters.
This can be especially helpful if you have a lot of administrative or repetitive tasks that don’t require your personal attention. For example, you might consider outsourcing tasks like social media management, customer service, or even accounting. Outsourced accounting, for instance, can be a great way to free up your time and ensure that your finances are being managed properly by professionals.
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#10: Project management made easy
As an entrepreneur, you probably have many projects on your plate right now. Each project has diverse tasks with different priorities, and it’s difficult to keep track of everything, especially if you work with a team. A good project management system will help you increase your productivity by not getting hung up on micro-planning everything.
Tools like Trello and Asana have emerged to make project management easy. Both allow you to break down projects into small tasks, set deadlines and priorities, assign tasks to different people, keep track of what has already been completed and what’s not, and access your projects from different devices.
All of these productivity tips for entrepreneurs will help you increase your focus. Here’s a bonus hack: accountability. Telling your goals and progress to others can do wonders for your productivity. To get started, check out these accountability groups and find like-minded people that will keep you accountable!
