Did you ever have one of those days where you were busy all day long, but you felt like you have accomplished absolutely nothing? We all do. We get caught up in a whirlwind of tasks or activities. The problem is that if we don’t focus on a specific task we will usually become frustrated, exhausted and we won’t see past the end of our own nose. It’s definitely a challenge to take the appropriate action that we need to take to continue to make our business grow.
One of the reasons that things can become stagnant or come to a halt is because we’ll bury ourselves in an endless ocean of administrative tasks instead of the major ones. It’s easier to finally go through all your emails or catch up on paperwork instead of focusing on the tasks that drive revenue. Yes, making sure your paperwork is done and emails are being responded to is important, but there needs to be a balance. Otherwise, you are setting yourself up for failure. Here are a few ways to make sure you get the most out of your tasks:
Organize
Use some type of small business CRM or another Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool to organize your day. There is also some free CRM software you can try out. The purpose is to get your activities setup for each day. You can also use these CRM programs to organize your contacts. You can have all your customers in one place to further streamline your tasks of having to search through different documents, spreadsheets or other applications you may be using. When you enter in all of your tasks, you may see that there are too many to complete in the timeframe that you have allotted. Here is where you start eliminating the tasks that are menial and not as important as other ones. I’m willing to bet you could eliminate up to half of them.
Focus
Having all your tasks written down and in front of you should definitely help you visualize what needs to be done instead of having swirling thoughts going around in your head. The next step is to focus on the critical tasks that need to be completed such as anything that has a sensitive timeline. If you have a presentation in a few days, then it would be important to make sure all the work for that is gathered and finished. That would be a time sensitive project versus writing instructional documents.
Prioritize
Unfortunately, there are only so many hours in each day. Prioritizing is critical to accomplishing your high priority tasks. This is where you discern those other tasks being asked of you during the week. If it’s something that takes more than a few minutes, then push it to the side if it’s not a hot button topic. If you are not the boss, then ask him/her to prioritize your activities if you are unsure. If you are the boss, then you’re always right! Take what you consider the most high priority item is, and work your way down.
The key is to work smarter and not just try to accomplish a task for the sake of accomplishing a task. We need to make sure it’s there for a reason.
Sandip
