Sometimes at the end of a long hard day we feel that we put in a lot of work, but ultimately got very little achieved. Here are three quick tips to be more productive and to have more control over your day.
1. Create a Prioritized To Do List
Instead of just creating a list of things that you want to do, create a list with the high value tasks being at the top. This could be things such as working with new clients, meetings, and project development. At the bottom of your list have your more mundane tasks such as responding to emails, and going through time sheets. It is also important not to overwhelm yourself with this list, make sure it is as doable as possible so you don't feel defeated if you are unable to accomplish it.
2. Track Your Time
Another valuable habit you can use is to track your time to make sure you are using it wisely. In tracking our time we can see which tasks we are focusing on to much, or to little. For example when I first tracked my time I realized I was spending far to much time on low priority tasks such as going through emails. I then was able to make a change where I put a hard limit on how long I will spend sifting through emails and was able to focus more on high priority tasks. There are many apps that can help you with this, but it is more about simply measuring your time, because as the saying goes, "what gets measured gets improved".
3. Track Your Projects
When you're running a business you have to switch task lanes pretty frequently and bounce back and forth between different projects. It can be really easy to pause a project or task to work on something else and then to come back to the first project only to be completely lost as to what stage you are at. A great way to avoid this is by keeping tack of what stage all of your projects are at, which will save you a lot of time and confusion. There a couple great apps that you can use for this such as Asana or Notion that make it very easy to track all of your tasks that you have on the go, and what stage they are at. However, it is still much more about just creating and committing to the habit than the tools you use.
