Task management techniques
to boost your productivity
Mark Coster
Founder of Pixooma
When you’re self-employed it’s important to get balance.
Sometimes it’s quiet workwise and other times you can find yourself literally drowning in proposals and urgent client deadlines. Part of the success of being your own boss is to differentiate between being busy and being productive.
Being busy is about working harder, while being productive is about working smarter.
Working smarter
Being busy is about working harder, while being productive is about working smarter. Being busy is often frantic as you try to be good at everything, while being productive is all about focus and concentrating on fewer things. It might have taken me a few years, but to me productivity is more easily achieved by focusing on income-generating activities, blocking time out for work, setting boundaries, automating repetitive tasks and outsourcing non-essential work where possible.
Learning these lessons has stood me in good stead recently, because since mid-December I have been consistently productive thanks to existing work from regular clients and new work from both existing and new clients. Whilst this has seen an increase in my workload, it hasn’t actually meant that I have found myself working longer days, weekends or pulling all-nighters. And the reasons for this, I can largely attribute to being efficient about how my time is organised and how the business has been set up.
Diary management
Currently my diary has time set aside every week for client work, networking, admin, business planning, finance and marketing. When client work increases, I am able to effectively borrow time from other areas to make up any additional time needed. So rather than lengthening my workday and wearing myself out getting everything done, I let low-priority tasks just drop off my list. That said I still attend my fixed, regular networking meetings, but as they tend to be held around breakfast, lunch or evenings anyway they don’t really get in the way. But I would drop some of the additional networking if needs be in order to free up additional time for client work.
In addition, whilst some of my long term marketing plans might progress at a slower rate or be delayed, they don’t stop all together thanks to some canny outsourcing and automation, which is good news for ongoing client communications and my prospect pipeline. Plus, some of my business planning activities, and admin duties can sometimes get pushed back (how far usually depends on how important it is) but once again, this is not a big issue as it gets done eventually.
Build in buffers
Another one of the ways that I can maintain higher levels of efficiency are the buffers that I build into everything client related. I always under promise and overdeliver, to deliberately set realistic expectations with clients and to ensure that projects are booked in with a conservative approach to predicting how long they will take.
One further buffer is that I always explain to clients that whilst they and their work remain a priority, I will also be working on other projects/tasks. This helps to set their expectations and ensures that if a new tight deadline is introduced they are not surprised when I need to push back.
Juggling to achieve the right balance
In recent weeks I have come up against more than a few pressing deadlines. This has resulted in a bit of juggling, occasionally this has meant I’ve needed to work an additional hour or two into the evening, or catch up with emails and admin at the weekend, but in the main it has been manageable within the current usual working hours.
That said it has made me thinking about the importance of looking at some contingency planning for holidays or unforeseen issues like illness, which can of course throw out even the most organised of working schedules.
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