h3mediaworks - Productivity Guide

Productivity Guide

by Heather Shoning

17 ways to cut the crap and get some shit done!

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ABOUT

About GET TO KNOW ME!

All About Heather Once upon a time, a young girl fell in love with all things home and design. When she grew up, she wanted to be an architect. Then an interior designer. HGTV came around, and she dreamed of flipping houses. But, as fate would have it, the girl was destined for a career helping professionals in the home and design industry to grow their business through small business coaching paired with marketing strategy and services.

Making Life Good For You Heather provides no-nonsense coaching that will help you create the business you’ve always dreamed of with freedom, flexibility and the income you desire. She employs a variety of the best coaching methods and marketing strategies learned from teachers such as Tony Robbins, Brooke Castillo, Marie Forlio, Amy Porterfield, Kelly Roach and more.

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INTRODUCTION

Introduction Small business owners experience overwhelm and decreased productivity as a result of that more frequently than we’d like to admit. When we feel overwhelmed it’s difficult to pull ourselves out of that and get our brains organized to maximize productivity.

What if I told you, you’re probably wasting 10 hours every week? You’d laugh, wouldn’t you? You think the reason you can’t get everything done in a day is because you are so busy. But it’s more likely that you can’t get everything done because you’re not using your time efficiently.

You might hop from task to task, starting something without finishing it before moving on to the next thing. Or maybe you get completely paralyzed by the mountain — read: to-do list — ahead of you and just retreat completely. Social media, lunch with a friend, poolside cocktails.

Don’t get me wrong — do those things, too. But do them without that nagging feeling caused by the work that didn’t get done that should have.

Instead, maximize your output so you can maximize and fully enjoy your life. Here are my favorite 17 ways to cut the crap and get shit done! h3mediaworks.com 3

LIFESTYLE CHANGE

Lifestyle Changes Your Day Begins the Night Before

Create a Morning Ritual

A great way to get yourself organized for the day is to do it the night before. When you wrap up your day, review what you’ve accomplished and what still needs to be done. Decide on three tasks that must be accomplished the next day and make a note to yourself. This can be a sticky note on your desk, and email reminder or — better yet — schedule time in your calendar to complete those items.

The most successful business people credit at least part of that success to a morning ritual. Starting your day with exercise, meditation or relaxing with a cup of coffee on the deck allows you to wake up, clear your head and have a moment of peace before the busy day begins. Maintaining your health — both physical and mental — will ensure you can work at your peak each day.

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LIFESTLE CHANGES

Having a game plan, that you created the previous night, will allow you to deflect emergencies and stay focused on the things that directly impact your business success. The same principle applies to each prospect meeting or important client phone call.

Take a few moments ahead of time to think about your goals and how you will create a positive outcome.

Take a Midday Break This might sound counterintuitive to getting more accomplished in a day, but it’s really a critical step in the process.

And I know you’ve heard this before, but I’m willing to bet you don’t do it as often as you should. However, most people encounter the midday slump, and trying to power through it

doesn’t work. You lose focus and can end up spending the entire afternoon distracted and tired. Get outside for a brisk walk. This offers a two-fold advantage: a walk to wake you up and sunshine to rejuvenate you.

Know Your Productive Times Pay attention to your schedule for a week to uncover clues as to your personal productivity schedule. If you find that you’re most alert and attentive to details at 8 a.m. but sluggish at 1 p.m., block time on your calendar at 8 a.m. for your detail-oriented tasks. Get your daily workout in at noon to boost your energy during your afternoon slump. Figure out what works best for you and change your calendar to suit. h3mediaworks.com 5

WORKSPACE CHANGES

Workspace Changes Declutter Your Workspace Nothing can zap your focus and energy than a cluttered desk. When your brain has to process all of the “stuff” in front of it, it’s difficult to focus on work. Go through the piles and throw out everything you can first. Whatever is left will probably fall into one of two categories — either it needs to be filed or some action needs to be taken on it. Do the filing immediately or have an assistant take over that duty. Create an inbox for papers that pile up that need action, and schedule a 15-minute window one day each week to conquer that inbox. Now that everything is tidy, be sure you put into place a system to keep it that way.

Movement Meetings Unless you’re a professional athlete and it’s all you do every day, you likely struggle to get enough exercise.

Sneak in movement where you can. Schedule walking meetings with your team instead of sitting around a table together. I know that sometimes you need project information in front of you. But if it’s a planning meeting or even a strategy session, walk and talk. If you need notes, use voice memos on your phone. Send the memo to your assistant or VA to transcribe and document it where needed.

You might also make it a policy that if you’re talking on the phone, you’re walking. Even if it means you go into the next room and hop on the treadmill. Fifteen minutes here and 30 minutes there will add up quickly!

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TASK MANAGEMENT

Task Management

Ditch the To-Do List

While a to-do list seems like a great idea to keep all the tasks you need to complete right in front of you, it really just becomes a growing and unmanageable albatross. If a task is worth your time, in other words, beneficial to the success of your business, it’s worth a time slot in your calendar. What gets scheduled, gets done. It’s fine to keep that laundry list, if you must, 8 Productivity Guide

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should put it in your calendar,” approach, I won’t lie and say I’ve given up mine completely. It’s hard. I use a hybrid approach, and to manage, categorize and delegate the items left on the list that I can’t quite let go of, I use Wunderlist, which I love, love, love.

The Only Thing to Interrupt Time Blocking but prioritize the tasks and put only the most important ones into your calendar.

Maybe the rest are items you can pass to an assistant or another team member as your business grows. That being said, it’s like decluttering your office – if you haven’t used it in a year (or in this case completed it), you can toss it.

Confession: Although I do often tout the “Get rid of your to-do list; if it’s important you

When you’re using the time blocking method to get things done, being a slave to your email is not part of that program.

You should have specific times you check your email. However, if you’re waiting for a supplier or a contractor to get back to you with important information that informs what you’re currently working on, you don’t want to miss that email.

Enter email-to-text service from your cell phone provider. All you have to do is quickly set up rule in your

calendar to forward email from the specific sender to you via text using a special number from your provider.

In Gmail, go into settings and filters, click “create new filter.” In the “forward to” you will enter the special email address from your cell service provider. You can find it with a simple Google search. Here are some of the largest carriers: VERIZON [insert your 10-digit number]@@vtext.com.

SPRINT PCS [insert your 10-digit number]@@messaging.sprintpcs.com ATT [insert your 10-digit number]@@mms.att.net T-MOBILE [insert your 10-digit number]@tmomail.net Now you can shut down your email for your time block and not worry about missing the information you’re waiting on. h3mediaworks.com 9

TASK MANAGEMENT

Dedicate Less Time to Work Have you ever spent an entire morning working on one small project — finding the perfect light fixture or putting together a proposal — only to look at the clock and wonder where all your time has gone.

There is truth to the idea that you will absolutely take every minute that you allow for a project to complete the project. Did you need all morning to complete the proposal? No. Could you have finished it in one hour? Yes. Only allow yourself the minimum amount of time to complete a project. Heck, shave 15 minutes off that, too. When you have 30 minutes to do something, you’ll get it done in 30 minutes. It all goes back to mindset. When you allow yourself all morning, you’ll find yourself task hopping, checking email, maybe even checking social media. Don’t do that. Set a short time block, focus on the task at hand and finish it within the allotted time.

Singletasking is the New Multitasking Recent studies have shown that instead of being super productive, multitasking actually slows you down. Instead, focus on completing one task at a time (singletasking!) during the time period you scheduled for that particular item. Otherwise, you actually waste time switching back and forth between tasks and your concentration is negatively affected, which could result in errors.

The brain cannot actively concentrate on two tasks at once. Sure you can walk and talk to a friend on the phone at the same time because neither of those tasks requires full attention. Gary Keller, of Keller Williams Realty Inc., gives two great examples in his book The One Thing: “If you were trying to talk a passenger through landing a DC-10, you’d stop walking. Likewise, if you were walking across a gorge on a rope bridge, you’d likely stop talking.”

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TRAIN YOUR BRAIN

your personal life, too) and determine the things you do that are not moving you toward your goals and dreams.

What things do you consistently say “yes” to that aren’t serving you and your business? Are there committees and boards you’re serving on that you don’t really love? While being involved in the community is incredibly important, be choosy about the ones you serve. If you dread it or find yourself skipping out on it often, this is a good indicator of something you need to add to your not-to-do list. Then just let it go — don’t feel guilty about prioritizing your precious time.

Leverage the 80/20 Rule

Train Your Brain Work in Your Genius Zone Often, as a small business owner, you likely find yourself doing everything.

You are the marketing department, the sales department, the accounting department and the list goes on. And on. Oh, and then you also have to be a designer sometimes, right? The ideal situation is for you to do the one thing that brings in the revenue. If you can focus your time on that one thing, you will be successful in whatever your goals might be — to work fewer hours, to make more money, to grow your

business. Start by eliminating things from your schedule and/or to-do list that really don’t directly move you closer to your goals. Then automate as much as you can — software and apps are your friend. See the next section on how to enlist the help of others to get control of your business, life and schedule.

Stop Doing Things that Don’t Serve You Many people have to-do lists, but have you considered a not-to-do list? It’s time to take a critical look at your work life (this works for

Eighty percent of our results will come from 20 percent of our efforts. So, block off 90 minutes each day (20 percent of an eight-hour day) to … you guessed it … singletask. Now, way back in the first section, I did tell you to make a list of the top three things that you need to get done the following day. Your 90-minute block is when you should get those tasks done — one at a time, not bouncing back and forth between the three. If you do this every day — and I do mean a full 90 minutes with no distractions, no checking email, no answering the phone — you will accomplish more than you ever imagined you could in a day.

This will move the needle on growth, revenue and ultimately freedom from feeling like a slave to your business. It will allow you to actually work less so you can relax and enjoy your business once again. h3mediaworks.com 11

GET HELP

Get Help

Hire a Team

This is critical: It’s a tough and sometimes scary step to take, but you must get help. Think about the important things that are either not getting done at all or only sporadically such as bookkeeping or marketing.

Those are the things you should entrust to someone else first. Find someone to outsource to and get as much of that work as possible off your plate. Once that weight is lifted, I guarantee you will be ready to outsource more 12 Productivity Guide

GET HELP

work or hire an assistant or junior designer to take over more of the load. Please, take my word for it — it will be worth spending some money to save yourself some sanity. And you can spend more time working on the things that bring in revenue and make you happy.

Get a Coach or Mentor

Click to Learn More

Coaching is an invaluable tool of which not nearly enough small business owners take advantage. For some, it feels like an extravagant expense — and it can be expensive. The h3mediaworks approach to coaching is a hybrid model that allows you to discover some answers for yourself while also offering advice that, if you act on it, can change your business in ways might never discover yourself.

They key to successful coaching is implementation. You have to be willing to take constructive criticism and instructions on how to improve and act on the feedback.

When you’re choosing a coach, first be sure it’s someone who has a broad insight to business in general, and if you can find someone who is familiar with your specific industry, you’ll be even better off. Find someone you like, respect and, most importantly, someone who knows more than you when it comes to things like business management and marketing. You know design. Let a coach help you with the rest.

Got Apps?

There are probably a million apps and techno gadgets out there designed to save you time. The key is determining what’s causing you to get off track, then finding the right tool to fix the problem. Get distracted every time you run across something on the Internet that you want to read? Use Pocket, an app that lets you capture online articles, videos and more so you can view them later. It works on all your devices so you have easy access to save and read articles when you have a few spare minutes such as waiting in line or if a client is running late. Maybe you get distracted by social sites or email when you need to be concentrating. Install the Freedom app to schedule distraction-free time blocks to get more work done. It works on all your devices so you stay focused.

As much as I try to practice what I preach by putting important to-dos in my calendar instead of on the endless to-do list, there’s still stuff I need to keep track of that eventually needs to get done. Or tasks that can be assigned to others on my team. For this, there are two free apps that I adore — Trello and Wunderlist. h3mediaworks.com 13

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It’s a tough and sometimes scary step to take, but you must get help.

They have drag and drop capabilities, quick prioritizing of tasks and you can share or assign tasks to others. You can even use them with people outside your organizations, so freelancers, contractors, you name it.

Go Techno Tighten up internal processes and procedures using top technology tools. There are tons of free or super inexpensive applications you can use if you’re a small operation or just starting out.

Scheduling contractors to meet on a jobsite can be a hassle. And if you need the homeowner there at the same time, too — oh boy. Enter Calendly. There is a free version if you want to give it 14 Productivity Guide

a whirl, but the premium version for only $8 per month offers so many more options and, specifically, for allowing a variety of group members to schedule. You get a custom URL for your meeting links, and all members get notifications and reminders.

Along the same lines of making scheduling easy, check out Acuity to let your prospects schedule phone (or in-person) consultations with you. Choose the days and times you want available for those meetings and your prospects will only see those time slots. You can easily set up emails that go directly to the prospect with instructions for preparing for the meeting or documents that you require them to fill out and return ahead of time. It can streamline the process up front so your consultations are quick and productive.

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Conclusion

I could go on and on about productivity and managing overwhelm for days, but I will wrap it up here by saying: None of this really matters in any significant way unless you’ve defined your goals for the year, three years, five years and beyond. Sure, it’s great to work more efficiently just to get

through each day, but the point is to make significant progress toward reaching your goals. I’m sure you think about them all of the time, but if you haven’t committed them to paper (actual or virtual), it’s time to do that so you have a clear path to success. h3mediaworks.com 15

CONTACT US HEATHER SHONING BUSINESS COACH + STRATEGIST email: heather@h3mediaworks.com phone: 720-556-2386 EMILY O’BRIEN PROJECT MANAGER email: emily@h3mediaworks.com CHANDRA SWANSON MARKETING ASSISTANT email: admin@h3mediaworks.com

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