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Productivity Tips Of Highly Successful Entrepreneurs by Matt Zemon

Productivity Tips Of Highly Successful Entrepreneurs
by Matt Zemon

Do you feel like you are running in place while your business is in a holding pattern? You are not alone. In fact, the feeling of being buried in details and unproductive has made time management a major field of study. Finding and mastering the tools that make you an effective entrepreneur rather than just busy takes studying and finding out what works for you.

Luckily, there is no shortage of information and tools available to help you research the subject and they all share certain ideas in common several common, especially for entrepreneurs.

One is the proven correlation between success and the productive use of time. All tasks are not created equal. Some generate money more quickly than others and some don't. Some are time sensitive and some are not. Highly successful people learn to know the difference and to get more of what they want done in less time than other people. They make disciplined choices about which are the most important tasks when it comes to making money. For every activity in business there is a cost and a benefit.

Trying to do every thing yourself just doesn't work, especially if your business is growing. As your business grows, your time should be increasing in value, so this is when offloading and outsourcing high volume activities can really pay off. One obvious time saver is your business phone. As a board member of www.liveanswer.com, I have seen what great 24/7 phone service can do to free up your time and allow you to focus on the priorities that will grow your business. Having your calls capably screened and having the important ones forwarded to you is an invaluable time saver.  It can help you focus on aligning every aspect of the company's activity toward revenue. In my last three businesses I have used a service like LiveAnswer to help me make more sales and provide better customer service for our customers.

Making meetings worth your time is another important part of time management and productivity. It takes some organizing beforehand and placing firm time limits on the length of the meeting. If you call the meeting, know what you want to achieve in the time allotted, make an agenda to achieve that end and then keep people on track. When someone asks to take a meeting with you make sure you tell him or her how much time you have and exactly how long the meeting will last. Once the meeting has started, pay attention and stick to the time you committed.

Another consideration is how to best use technology. Use it when and where you need it. If you have trouble focusing or fighting distractions there are a number of software products that can help. There are programs that can help you block out chunks of time without interruptions and others that will measure the effectiveness of how you use your time. Some worth considering include: Freedom, Anti-Social, Get Concentrating, Rescue Time, WriteRoom (Mac), and DarkRoom (Windows). Still other programs help with everything from file storage (ShareFile), project management (Wrike), help desk management (Zendesk), webinar hosting (GoToMeeting) tracking projects and deadlines (Trello).

In today's business environment, email can be a Godsend or a curse if not managed well. Finding time saving tools and practices to make email work for you is definitely worth doing. Start by asking staff and associates to ask for a response in the subject line of an email, when they need one. Create a disciplined approach to answering emails-apportion a block of time every day and keep your responses short and to the point. One technique I try and live by is to only touch an email once.  This means that I either respond to the email, delegate the email or move the action needed onto a to-do list and get the email out of my inbox.

Productively delegating tasks is the key driver for success. Ask for help and give others the authority to execute the tasks requested and you can spend your time creating revenue-producing ideas. Being busy is not the same as being productive. Marc Lesser said it so well in "LESS: Accomplish More by Doing Less"

"After a great deal of thought, I realized the key is not to do more or work harder; the key is actually to find ways to do less and think more, to be less busy and more productive. In this, I have struck upon the very secret to what separates the super achievers from the rest of us."

There is more being written and shared on this subject every day as the way we do business evolves. It is critical to keep learning what is new and how you can make better use of your time. This is a list of a very few resources that are worth a look now:

Productivity Software Tools I love:

Virtual assistants and freelance resources:  

Want to know more?  Here are a few articles to check out:


 

Matt Zemon is the President & CEO of American Support, an inbound and outbound telesales provider to 5 of the top 10 cable companies in America, one of the "Top 10 places in the cable industry to work" according to CableFax magazine and one of the world's "Most Democratic Organizations" as certified by WorldBlu. Zemon is also the COO for LiveAnswer, an on-demand call center.

Zemon is co-President of Jobs4America, the Entrepreneur-in-Residence for the National Military Spouse Network and a board member of Entrepreneurs' Organization (EO) Raleigh Durham.   

 

Have a question about your business plan for Matt? Ask here. Your question/answer may be printed in a future issue.

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