Important Productivity Tips For Small Business Owners

There are several difficulties which small business owners face such as running a company effectively, looking after employees, dealing with everyday clients and to maintain a healthy profit all while taking care of the never-ending list of business-related responsibilities. There are only two simple ways to increase workplace productivity which is either put in more working hours or simply work smarter. Though it is obvious that you cannot buy more time, what you can do is you can work towards accomplishing more with the time which you have in your hand.

Here are some important productivity tips for small business owners to help them manage time and work more efficiently and even fit in more work to their already busy schedule.

1. Get Sufficient Sleep

When you arrive first at work and are the last one to leave the office, it usually leaves a positive impact on your employees. When in the initial stages of starting your own business it is practically guaranteed that you will be working long hours and occasionally pulling all-nighters because the entrepreneurial grind is very real and you have to work a lot for it. This extremely hectic routine can take a serious toll on the best of us but what you need to understand is that continuous exhaustion and sleep deprivation will lead to reduced or non-existent concentration, increased stress levels, constant mood swings and cause difficulty in problem-solving.

Continuing sleep deprivation escalates the risk of heart problems, weight gain or loss and can cause serious disruption on your hormones. If you are having serious difficulty at sleeping on time and waking up then you should consider creating and following a sleep schedule and carrying out a nightly bedtime routine in which you do not use any smartphone or laptop. Proper sleep assists our brain to repair damaged neural pathways and boosts long-term and short-term memory retention. Research has shown that a healthy adult should sleep for almost 7 to 8 hours. In a survey, 84% of people who slept less than 7 hours were felt more irritable. It is quite evident that sleep is really important if you want to be efficient at your workplace.

2. Arrange and Assign Tasks

Assigning and arranging are two of the most significant organizational and time management abilities every small business owner must have and should know how to put it to use effectively. When you are setting your priorities, the best way to do it is to place the most difficult, urgent, time and resource-consuming task at the top of your to-do list and plan on completing them first. You should identify the tasks which require your attention and assign those tasks to others which are of relatively less importance. This will allow you to focus more on the most urgent tasks and complete them before deadlines. This will help you by creating a free-flowing workflow and will help you to be quicker in completing tasks.

3. Ignore as Many Distractions as Possible

Whatever the distraction is, be it a colleague coming to your desk for a friendly chat or be it simply notifications from your smartphones, or even if you just feel like giving a scroll through your social media. All these distractions and interruptions are highly disturbing for your productivity. What you should do is, keep your office doors closed so that you avoid being interrupted by any of your colleagues and you should also keep your smartphones away from you when you are working. You should even encourage your employees to keep their phones off at work, but you should also ensure that they get regular breaks to check on their phones.

4. Concentrate on a Single Task

Multitasking feels like the best solution to the increasing work demand in organizations that are growing and developing. But this is not even remotely close to the real truth. In fact, multitasking causes a decrease in efficiency and work quality and it makes very difficult for us to filter out unrelated information and organizing our thoughts. Multitasking also develops the production of the stress hormone cortisol and this eventually leads to mental exhaustion. What you should do instead of multitasking is to try and consolidate your tasks and work-related duties and focus on a single task and then stick to it until you have completed it perfectly. While focusing on one particular task you can alternatively automate tasks such as task management, data backup, and event schedules, etc.

5. Maintaining Employee Comfort

It is important that you understand that your employees are the backbone of your company and need to be treated in the same way. When you provide them with a comfortable, stress-free work environment and ensure that they have the right accessories for the job, you are indefinitely making their job a lot easier and more pleasant to perform. You should encourage your employees during meetings and listen to their concerns and ideas attentively. Most of all, you should not be afraid to show them that you’re listening to them by following some of the ideas that were given by your employees.

Conclusion

By now it is quite obvious that increasing productivity is not about extra work hours or working harder than ever before, it is rather about being smart and enhancing your efforts by doing quality work in less time and greatly reduce the amount of time you waste on unnecessary tasks. You should focus on keeping your employees happy and motivated and ensure that they have everything they need to complete their work without any distraction.