Knowing Yourself Brings Better Productivity for Business Owners

When I was a kid, my eye doctor would always tell me that dynamite comes in small packages because I was always short for my age.

Being short doesn’t really bother me, and I don’t think it bugged me back then either. I have always been aware that height is nothing I can change – I’m short whether I like it or not.

I accepted my height a long time ago because I’d be miserable otherwise, and I work around it when I need to (like climbing grocery store shelves to reach the highest one!)

December 21 is Short Girl Appreciation Day, but every day is a good day to appreciate the things about you that you can’t change. Your productivity is dependent on your brain, and appreciating the things you can’t change and working around them when necessary will help you be more productive.

Improving time management skills requires you to be realistic and know yourself

If being productive requires you to be a person you’ve never been, you’re not going to be able to make it work. Instead, take the person that you are right now and use your knowledge of yourself to be more effective.

For example, take the “broductivity gurus” (no really, take them. Away. Somewhere) who preach rising at 4:00 or even earlier in the morning to get a bunch of things done before you start your day. If you’re a lion sleep chronotype who likes to wake up early, this advice might work for you.

But for the other sleep chronotypes (bear, wolf, dolphin) who don’t like to wake up early and have their super-focus times later in the day, waking early will just make you tired and irritable. If you normally and naturally wake up at 7 am or later, trying to wake up earlier is mostly going to disrupt your sleep cycle because you’ll have to go to bed so much earlier to account for early rising.

Managing distractions is personal to you

There are some things that distract pretty much everyone, notifications being one of them. (Just a reminder that interruptions can take up to 23 minutes of your time, so you could be losing an entire hour of work if you get three notifications.) 

You can avoid distractions simply by turning them off on your phone and your computer. That means no flashes, no buzzes, no vibrations, no pop-ups, no nothing. But a lot of people find themselves scrolling or distracted by apps even without notifications. 

In that case, they discover that they need to remove apps from their phones to avoid the distractions completely. 

There may also be other distractions that you need to manage. Maybe certain noises are an issue, for example. You could get a pair of noise-canceling headphones, or maybe a white noise machine (I use one at night since my neighborhood can be noisy.)

What are the things that pull your focus away from your work, and how can you remove or at least reduce their impact on you? 

Humans are most productive when they do one task at a time (even if sometimes it feels like you’re going faster when you’re multitasking. But you’re not.) Anything that interrupts your focus is going to decrease your productivity.

Sometimes eating the frog works, but some people need to approach it differently

When you're procrastinating on a task, it can be hard to get going. The usual advice is to eat the biggest and most difficult part of the frog first, and that does work for a lot of people.

Everyone can break down a big task into smaller, manageable chunks and then tackle them one by one. It’s often the easiest way to get started: figure out the steps you need to take for the big project and then decide what order to go in. 

When you have a small, manageable task to do, getting started isn’t as hard to do. And once you’ve started you’ll probably keep going for a while and that way you end up getting a lot done.

Getting big, hard tasks done is kind of like exercise. Thinking about a half hour or 45 minutes feels like too much, and it’s hard to get started. The recommendation for people who don’t like to exercise is just to decide you’ll do, say, 10 minutes. 

Most of the time, once you’ve been going for 10 minutes you’ll keep going for the whole session. It’s the getting started that’s the tricky part. Chunking a big task into smaller ones helps you get started, which makes the whole project easier.

However, some people need to “warm up” a bit on tasks that maybe aren’t as important. You chunk out the project, then give yourself ten or fifteen minutes on something else before you tackle the first chunk.

But here again, knowing yourself will help you be more productive. If you know you easily tend to go down the rabbit hole on social media, especially when there’s a task that’s big or scary, then you can’t do the warm-up beforehand. For you, diving in right away is a better option.

Or maybe you just need an external cue. Use a Pomodoro timer to get started. Once you’ve begun, it’s a lot easier to keep going. Let inertia be your friend!

Recap (tl;dr)

If you want to be productive, you have to know yourself and how you work best. Learn to manage the things you can’t change so that you can improve your effectiveness at work.

If time management and productivity are keeping you stuck at a profit plateau, schedule a complimentary consult here to see if I can help.