3 Productivity Tips

Everyone is looking for an edge; we look at the latest trends and will try anything (within reason of course) to give ourselves a competitive edge. Always looking to increase productivity, increase bottom line … and most recently increasing company culture!

Here are 3 tips so that you can be more productive and efficient to get that competitive edge!

Tip #1: Batching & Theming
I’ve written about this before but it’s always good to reinforce this concept! Before my eyes were opened, I was a slave to my inbox. Constantly ready to respond to client’s request at any given moment. Side Note: We could have an entirely other discussion just based off acting vs. reacting. Back to the focus here… Batching is bundling like tasks together and attacking them at the same time. While, theming is categorizing time slots in your calendar or even certain days.

Here’s an example of each
Batching Example: Batching all your tasks as it relates to production together while you batch your sales tasks separate. Keep in mind, these tasks require the opposite usage of your brain and you wouldn’t want to flip back and forth from an analytical mindset to a strategic mindset; or would you?

Theming Example: Theming could be attacking all your sales tasks every single morning from 9am - 10pm or it could be a bit deeper and be once a month spend half of your time running sales reports to assign key strategies for specific tasks.

Tip #2: Timing your Tasks 
This is one of my favorite tips I can offer in terms of productivity! Experts will say most of your work-related tasks could take about 15 minutes. With this in mind, write out your to-do list and assign a time to all your tasks. Open up a time tracking app on your phone, such as the “Clock” app in iPhone, and set your timer for 15 minutes for 100% focus to complete your task. Make sure you turn your phone on silent and ignore any notifications that might come through.

Tip #3: Inbox Pause by Boomerang
Boomerang is an app for Gmail that primarily helps scheduling emails. One of their features, that is likely less known, is called “Inbox Pause”. Inbox Pause does exactly what you’d guess it does … it pauses your inbox. You simply click “pause” while you are in your gmail and it pauses all incoming emails. If you’re anything like me, then you have multiple tabs of your email open. While you may be working in your CRM, like commonsku perhaps, you can still see your gmail tab with that tiny blue dot. You know the blue dot I’m talking about … this dot represents new mail coming in. How tempting! Don’t you just want to know who emailed you? Maybe it’s a client approving a big sales order you just sent out; there are a million thoughts running through your (well, mine at least) head when you see this blue dot. You may not realize it but subconsciously you are thinking about it and you are being less effective with the actual work you are trying to do!

I love Inbox Pause, I’ll pause my inbox, set my timer (from tip #2) and get sh*t done. It works, try it out!

Bonus Tips: Google Chrome MUSTS!
Duplicate Tab Feature: If you right click in the chrome tab you are using it will give you a set of options. One of which is called “Duplicate Tab”. I can’t even tell you how many times a day I use this feature. It’s great for creating another tab for any important information you might want to put on your second screen or even as simple as clicking a link (for those pesky websites that have links that don’t open a link in a new tab and take you away from what you were looking at). The options to use this are endless…

Pin Tab Feature: You can access this the same way as the duplicate tab. This one is my favorite! By clicking “pin tab” it will make your tab about a fifth of the usual size and move it all the way to the left. I think of this as home base anytime I set-up my workstation; I have my calendar, google drive, commonsku, and my email all pinned and set to the far left. Any other tabs that are open are just for reference sake and I try to close those as soon as possible. In all reality, my actual work that gets done is from my pinned tabs. Oh, and I also use the duplicate feature to copy my pinned tabs and place that on my second screen so that I can have the same set-up on both monitors (you can highlight shift copy all to make it easy or use “ctrl” and just copy the ones you like).

Check out these tips, I’m sure at least something here can help you be more productive in your workday!

If you want more productivity tips on how you can be more efficient with your time, then my book “Success With Swag(ger)” is for you! I outline how you can start working with virtual assistants (VA’s) to grow your business! It’s an actionable step-by-step guide to identifying what tasks are wasting your time and guides you to hiring your first VA!

You can check out the book on Amazon by searching “SwagSam” or just clicking the link here.

Here’s a simpleTo-Do list form you can use to help you organize your tasks!