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You hear all the time that you or your company needs to be more efficient. But do you know how to accomplish that?
And with more people working at home, efficiency and productivity are the name of the game at the moment.
There are many distractions around you, both in the workplace and especially at home so you really need to stay focused to remain efficient and get your tasks done.
Efficiency seems like a word that is thrown at as the end-all be-all answer to problems within an organization.
However, without a proper plan, the likely result will be confusion and chaos, and this could potentially have the opposite effect! So, you need to plan out how you and/or your employees can become more efficient
The following ‘efficiency hacks’ can help you when you are given the initiative to be more efficient.
Learning
Always be on the lookout for how to improve your job or your teams’ jobs.
This often requires learning new skills. The more you learn, the easier it will be to find alternative methods that work better.
As an entrepreneur, you should always be looking to increase your skills, especially your marketing skills.
Anyone who wants to be successful in life should be constantly learning.
Organization
If your office environment is cluttered and there is no sense of organization, it can impact the productivity of the entire group.
There are professionals who can assess your current situation and make recommendations on how to improve the environment.
This can include such aspects as desk clutter, filing, and even ergonomic issues and proper placement of fixtures or furniture.
Automation
When you find ways to automate, this frees up your staff to work on more important tasks.
Mundane tasks that eat away the time of your staff are the best candidates for automation. It is possible to go overboard with automation which can cause slowdowns when the automation processes fail.
There are many types of software that can automate tasks and this is useful to a business and invaluable to an entrepreneur (particularly a solopreneur)
Try to determine the best tasks to automate without overdoing it.
Delegate
If you are micromanaging the work of your team, you won’t have time to handle your own tasks.
Your team won’t respect the fact that you are doing tasks that they should be doing. You hired them for a reason. Let them get their jobs done. It’s okay for them to come to you when they get stuck.
But you should guide them rather than simply doing everything for them.
Outsource
With corporate cutbacks, delegating may not be easy to accomplish.
Companies are expecting their employees to do more with less. But managers still need to get their work done. In such cases, it may be worthwhile to consider outsourcing some of the tasks of your team.
The benefits of outsourcing are that it does not increase the company’s headcount. And as a solopreneur, you can outsource content and product creation and then you can concentrate on the marketing.
If you want to know more about outsourcing, you can download a really useful free report here.
Time Management
If you and your team are not managing your time efficiently, you are going to find it hard to move the company forward.
The team will constantly be missing deadlines and playing catch up. This makes the group look bad and causes undue stress on the team.
The likely result will be high turnover at times when team members are needed the most.
If you are working from home, especially if you are an entrepreneur, you can employ the Pomodoro technique. If you want to know about this, check out this post here.
Time Management And Efficiency Go Hand-In-Hand
If you want to know the best time management system available, the answer is, choose one. This may seem like a cop-out to you. But it’s like a gym membership. What is the most expensive gym membership available? The one you never use.
Time management systems are going to have similar traits from one to the next. Whether one is better than the other is largely dependent on who is trying to get you to use theirs. If you find a time management system, give it a shot and see if it is right for you.
The key is to find one. That is going to be one of the main components of increasing your efficiency. If you read about a particular system, implement it for a couple of months and see how it goes.
But and this is crucial, keep going. The worst time management system is not having one. You will be spinning your wheels if you go this route.
Time management is going to take discipline and habit, especially if you haven’t been doing it. You need to get started, and you continue using it. If you are one that believes habits form in 28 days, then use your system for 28 days.
Just make sure you have something in place that allows you to evaluate that system. Hopefully, you will be experiencing higher productivity during that period.
Don’t get discouraged if you stop using your system. Maybe it isn’t the right one for you. Find another one. Ask colleagues and friends for suggestions. Just make sure you “get back on the horse.”
Once your time management system is habitual and useful, there will be no stopping your progress.
When you discover a time management system that works for you, become an advocate. You can help others and, in the process, help yourself. If you and your team are operating more efficiently through the use of proper time management, your company becomes a bit more efficient as a result.
Who knows, your team may become the model for the company. Stranger things have happened.
One outcome that is highly likely is your team will get recognition. You will get your tasks done faster and will be able to take on more than you were able to before.
You and your team will prove to your management that you are capable of taking on bigger and better tasks. It’s all possible with the help of time management.
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