Productivity Hacks for Entrepreneurs
As multi-business owners, parents, and all-around busy people, productivity is of the utmost importance to us!
It’s something that has been prioritized since the beginning of our first business back in 2012, because it started as a side hustle while Maurice was a full-time student also working and Alisha had a full-time job.
Fast forward to us being parents of two little ones, building a home, and scaling two businesses – we’ve found ALL THE HACKS to be able to ensure the most amount of work gets done in the least amount of time.
1. Batchworking
This is one of the simplest ways to get a lot of work done at once. This blog is a perfect example, they often are written in batches, not on a weekly basis (with a few exceptions). It might take 1-2 total hours to write enough content for 4-8 blogs.
HACK: Find tasks in your life/business that can be lumped together or “batched” so you don’t have to interrupt your workflows on an ongoing basis to get them done. This could be social media content, podcasting, or anything else that has be be done ongoing.
2. Simple & repeatable processes
We PREACH simple & repeatable processes across all our business content because it truly is a game changer! Having simple & repeatable processes inside your business is the only way to truly be efficient, optimize your time, and scale. If every single step has to be manually triggered or has no repeatable measures, you will be buried under work forever.
HACK: identify any process that happens on a recurring basis for you. Take the time to write out its Standard Operating Procedure (SOP), so that it can be automated, simplified, or outsourced. If you need more info on how to do this, check out our Scaling Made Simple curriculum.
3. Templates
These go hand in hand with simple & repeatable processes. Whether it’s canned emails, proposals, DM scripts, standard operating procedures, or anything else... The less you have to create from scratch or use real-time brain power to get a task done, the higher opportunity it will get crossed off the list. If you don’t already have templates, start creating them for everything that is repeated in your life/business.
HACK: any time you are using the same response, same design, same procedure for anything within your business, make it a template.
4. Stay organized
Making sure everything has a place, keeping all passwords in a single location, knowing how/where everything is, decluttering as needed… All of this applies whether we’re talking about physical or virtual) spaces. Marie Kondo was onto something!
HACK: allow your browser to save your passwords, or if you’re a gmail use, allow google to save your passwords so that no matter what device you’re on, they are available to you
5. Plan
If it's not on the calendar, it doesn’t get done (that's our motto!). And in order for it to get done, it needs to be planned in advance. Alisha schedules her workouts a week in advance, to make sure meetings or other things don’t railroad them. Maurice is on the phone with contractors figuring out what comes next with our home build weeks in advance. Running multiple businesses, having two kids, building a custom home, and having personal lives… Everything needs to be planned!
HACK: create a shared calendar (ours is electronic, on apple calendar) to add all commitments and happenings. This way you always know what’s going on without double booking yourself or forgetting to follow up on something.
More is not more, less is more.
