Boost Productivity By Organizing Your Time
Is your calendar as chaotic as your catch-all drawer?
(You know the one. Extra sauce packets from takeout, probably some rubber bands and twist ties, maybe the manual to your Keurig, some old keys to locks you no longer use, a couple of chopsticks or plastic cutlery bundles, etc.)
April 26 is Get Organized Day, and you also know the usual suspects for organizing. Desk, clean and clutter free? How about your desktop - is it covered in files you have to hunt for or the 75 tabs you have open? (Relatively easy to organize, even if right now it’s a bit messy.) Files, both business and personal? Your closet?
These can all be helpful if you want to accomplish more while you’re working, particularly if you work from home.
But all this overlooks the most important organizational tool: your calendar.
Taking control of your calendar every day is critical for productivity improvement
When you control your time, you can accomplish everything that’s necessary for your business. And you won’t even have to work 10 hours a day during the week and hours on the weekends to do it.
I was in an online networking group when something absolutely shocking (to me, anyway) happened. The hosts asked, What would you do if you had one to two hours to focus?
IF YOU HAD ONE TO TWO HOURS TO FOCUS.
IF.
(still trying to recover from the shock)
There were probably 50-60 women on the call, I think. The responses came in thick and fast: write a book! Clear up my website! Write a talk! Etc. Etc.
Clearly I am not doing a good enough job putting myself out there! One of my core messages to help boost productivity is to block out the best time to focus on your calendar each day and don’t allow interruptions to that time.
Do you want to be profitable and still have time to spend with your loved ones and engage in nonwork activities you love?
Then you need focus time to get the important, necessary work done.
Time management helps you have a more productive day
As a business owner, you know you’re often putting out fires. You might have a tendency, like so many of us, to just do what’s next in front of you.
But the problem is, those aren’t the high-leverage tasks that you as the owner of the business should be doing. They can (and should) be delegated to other people while you work on just the critical things that no one else can do.
Easier said than done?
Not really. Once you know what your priorities are – the tasks that move the business forward that are completely dependent on you to do them – then you know what you need to focus on each day.
Then, you block off time to do them. You don’t have to go through the day in 15-minute increments, because that’s probably a waste of time. A better method is to use blocks at least an hour long.
Say the best time for you to focus on things that require a lot from your brain, like number crunching and strategizing, is from 9 am to 1 pm. That’s pretty typical for a bear sleep chronotype.
You would block off that time on your calendar, and you would treat it as an appointment with your best client (because it is.) Meaning you don’t allow interruptions or skip it. You use the time for the important work that only you can do – everything else can take place later in the day.
If you have other things you want to do – write a book, adjust your website, look for networking opportunities or whatever – put those in your calendar too. Again, those are serious appointments that can’t be skipped or minimized or interrupted.
You can color code your calendar if that’s helpful to you, but it’s not important for everyone. The critical piece is you have to treat these appointments as business appointments and not just pretty colors on your schedule.
Boundaries are necessary during focus time if you want to boost productivity
In my experience, many business owners find it easy to block their calendars at the beginning of the week. In practice, they find they don’t spend the time they’ve blocked off in the right activities.
Because they’ve:
Enabled notifications, so they get distracted when an email arrives or someone responds to their Insta post or the phone rings
Not recognized the need to have firm boundaries
Been lax in enforcing the boundaries of their time blocking, so no one else on the team takes them seriously either
Allowed themselves or team members to schedule other meetings during this time
Adopted a corporate open-door policy, which is detrimental to people who own their own business if they never have time to focus on their work ON the business
In the 20th century, and even earlier in the 21st, boundaries were more or less taken for granted. There was no email after hours, no texting, nothing like that. Even if you might spend a few days working long hours, once you left your office you were pretty much done for the day.
We don’t have that, due to the advent of email and texting and so forth. That means you can’t rely on those automatic boundaries, and you have to both create and reinforce your own.
If you don’t want emails from customers after hours, train them that your hours are X to Y and any emails outside then will be handled the next day. (Make sure you schedule your own emails to occur between X and Y yourself, to set the example for everyone else.)
If you want your team to go home at Y because you want them to rest and recharge so they don’t burn out, you too need to go home at Y and not email anyone after Y. (Again, if you do, just schedule the emails to be sent during regular business hours.) Bonus, this will help you avoid burnout too!
Recap:
If your calendar isn’t organized, you’re missing out on a huge productivity boost. Time management and boundaries help you reinforce your time to focus, when you get the important work done that only you can do.
Need help taming your time so you can be more productive and work fewer hours while still making money? I can help. Schedule a complimentary call with me here to see if we’re a good fit to work together.