Wondering how to be more productive as a business?

Ensuring great productivity across the board is essential – not just because it helps grow your overall income for your business, but also because it keeps your entire team more organized, more relaxed and even happier with their jobs.

For these reasons – and there are many more where these came from – increasing productivity should always be a priority for your business.

Whether it’s changing the way you and your team work, changing and updating your software and other tools and apps or implementing new productivity strategies.

Which is why, in this blog, I’m going to share some of my biggest and best productivity tips for businesses.

“According to Jeannie Assimos, marketing manager at way.com, time tracking tools can be extremely useful as a business, for multiple reasons:”

1.    Leverage time tracking in an effective way

Time tracking tools can be extremely useful as a business, for multiple reasons:

• They help you understand where and how you’re spending the majority of your time, as a business
• Find out which tasks take too much time and should be cut down on
• They provide you with an easier, much more effective way to keep track of your employees (which in turn, also helps you be more productive with your invoicing and accounting!)

Time tracking, in essence, helps improve your time management – and that, of course, is an integral part of improving overall productivity.

Here are all the best ways to leverage time tracking to improve your productivity:

• Try timesheet software to easily and automatically track your entire team’s attendance (including when they started work and how much they worked each day); ideally, you’ll want to automate this process as much as possible so that you not only collect this data automatically (your employees will only have to check in and out) but also so that you can automate wage calculations and cut down hours out of your accounting
• Leverage time tracking to track everything you do throughout the day: this could help you discover some very interesting things about how you spend your time – and how much time you’re spending on tasks that you really shouldn’t. Keep a close eye on all of your tasks to see which tasks take up the most of your time and then ask yourself: do I have to do this task? What is the ROI (return on investment) for this task (i.e. why is it important for my business that I do this?) Is there any way I can speed it up? Is there any software that I can use to automate this process or at the very least, make it shorter?

2.    Use project and task management to increase your productivity

Another important software that can make a huge difference to your productivity – and your results, for that matter – is project and task management software.

Because the truth is that managing projects as a business can get very complex and very confusing, very quickly: from missing and forgetting things to not finding what you need, when you need it.

However, with a good project management software to help, you can plan your projects in full and ensure that you’re keeping track of all the necessary steps and tasks, and that you have everything you need to finish a project in one place.

And this is doubly important when you work on a project as a team.

Use project management software to:

• Create projects to keep track of all the tasks involved in achieving your project objectives
• Turn projects into templates to reuse time and time again
• Assign tasks to team members so that everyone clearly knows what to do
• Establish a clear (and realistic!) timeline for your project, including the smaller tasks involved so that everyone on your team knows their deadlines
• Share and store necessary files and documents in the same place so that you don’t lose time looking for what you need to complete your tasks
• Communicate with your team directly using the project management software so that absolutely everything – from tasks to documents to communication – is all in one place

3.    Automate processes

As a business, you likely go through certain processes over and over again – onboarding new hires and new clients, sending proposals and invoices and so many others.

For example, let’s say you have a web design agency; that means that you’re constantly onboarding new clients and that involves a lot of communication from both parties: usually, getting the information you need from them so that you can start their project.

And this part can take up a lot of time, not just hours – but days. However, by automating the process, you can massively cut down on the time you spend chasing clients for more information and all the time wasted waiting to hear back.

This is just one example, of course – there are many processes that you go through as a business so the first step is to identify these processes; for example:

• Onboarding new hires
• Onboarding new clients
• Accounting and finances
• Scheduling
• Sending emails

Once identified, you can start looking for ways to optimize these processes; and depending on what your needs are, look for software that will help you automate each process as much as possible so that all you have to do is set it up – and the tool does the rest of the work for you.

4.    For business owners: learn to focus on the important and leave the rest

As a business owner, it’s important to manage your time as effectively as possible.

However, that can be very difficult to do when you want to have complete control over your business and want to know everything about it and all the in’s and out’s.

It’s so tempting to do that but the truth is, you can’t grow your business if you don’t focus on the important stuff.

First, start by auditing your time: use time tracking to find out exactly where your time is going.

Once you’ve got a clear picture of how you spend your work days, it’s time to start optimizing your time and improving your productivity; here are some very useful tips to help:

• Prioritize your tasks every day: take the time to consider which tasks are truly important and urgent and do those first
• Learn to delegate: it’s so tempting to do everything yourself – but that just means that you won’t have time to do the things that only you can do. Because of that, you need to delegate as much as possible so that you can focus on growing your business
• Learn to say NO: your time is valuable and the truth is… you don’t need to say yes to everything. Whether it’s meetings, events, freebies, ask yourself whether you truly need to do that or not.
• Use software as much as possible: leverage free trials to try out different software to see whether it helps improve your productivity. In the end, even though it might cost you to get all this software, the time it can save you is much more valuable as it means you’ll be able to spend more time on the tasks that actually help make you money

Work smarter, not harder

Take the time to evaluate your productivity regularly, both for you as a business owner and for your entire business as a whole.

Your business productivity should always be a priority because it will ultimately help you cut down your costs, increase your revenue and ultimately, grow your business.

Use the tips outlined in this article to help get you started and constantly re-evaluate your productivity to keep improving your time management and your overall results.