When you went into business for yourself, you probably didn’t envision how difficult it would be to maintain productivity throughout the workday. Let’s face it: without a bunch of corporate bigwigs breathing down your neck, what sort of fire is there to spur you on to work at 100% every day when you are on your own?
In partnership with Adobe, we’re excited to provide these tips and insight with you!
It is tough, running your own business. Everything is riding on you and the amount of progress you make every day. The successes you ultimately achieve all come down to how much you can accomplish in the time you have carved out for your business—and sometimes that is not a lot.
As the owner of a small business, productivity is not something that will come naturally to you, you will find lots of distractions at work. That is not to say you are not capable of being productive; it is just the nature of the job. Competing priorities all calling for your attention, mistakes of the past calling you to return to them, and your mind wandering over to the lofty goals you have set for the future. It is a lot to process, all while trying to focus on the tasks at hand.
Productivity in business is not impossible to achieve though. It simply takes some work and a little help.
Here are some tips for how you can start being more productive for the well-being of your business.
7 Tips for Being More Productive
1. Don’t Power Through
There are many who say that working in small increments with a pre-set break schedule is beneficial to keeping productivity and energy levels up. That is why there is such a thing as the Pomodoro Technique.
2. Remove Temptations
Whether you run your business out of your home or an off-site workspace, temptations are everywhere. Anything can break your concentration and force you to have to “reboot” and refocus again. Put a lock on your door, close out your email, and put a distraction blocking tool on your phone and computer to keep those temptations out.
3. Stay Accountable
Employees are not the only ones who are guilty of time theft. If you find that you are not generating as much work as you thought you would each day, use a time tracker to see what’s going on.
4. Schedule Everything
There are so many project and task management tools available for a reasonable price that there is no excuse not to schedule your workday. This includes breaks, meetings, assignments, business management tasks, and so on.
5. Delegate When You Can
Perhaps your lack of productivity is not that due to distractions. Perhaps it is that you have too much on your plate and you are burning out. Don’t be afraid to outsource tasks to other team members or freelancers when you can.
6. Use Software to Streamline and Automate
Cloud-based software is truly revolutionizing the workplace—especially for small businesses that now have tools available to help them run as efficiently as large corporations. If you are not using it to automate your workflows, outsource administrative tasks, or streamline your process, you are missing out.
7. Work Smarter with Those Tools
There are so many wonderful things about cloud-based tools; I am not even sure where to begin. How about their ability to empower users to work from anywhere and from any device? How about their ability to sync up with other systems to cut down on the back and forth of transferring files and information to one another? How about their real-time applications?
Adobe’s Contribution to a More Productive Small Business
Here’s an example of one of those smarter business tools: Adobe Document Cloud. This tool provides small businesses with all the tools they need and, more importantly, tools that should be integrated with one another in supportive of a more productive work environment.
If you have not heard the big news yet, Adobe Document Cloud is bringing some big changes to the small business landscape.
The one I am most excited about is Adobe Scan, which I think has huge promise to be a game changer for small businesses.
Up until now, software that enabled users to scan images or text and convert them to PDF just weren’t “smart” enough. They only worked well on desktop computers. They could not extract text out of a scan and make it selectable or copyable. They also couldn’t do anything to improve the appearance of photos captured. However, that is not the case anymore with Adobe Scan.
“Adobe Scan represents a radical reimagination of how to capture your most important document content. Adobe invented PDF creation for PCs, and with Adobe Scan we are doing the same for a mobile-first world,” said Bryan Lamkin of Adobe.
“Adobe Scan represents a radical reimagination of how to capture your most important document content. Adobe invented PDF creation for PCs, and with Adobe Scan we are doing the same for a mobile-first world.”
