Can you think of that person who enters the room and takes charge? We were in a meeting this week when I heard a story about someone who was tired of not knowing who to send people to on a project. They were constantly getting shuffled around. So, they took charge! They created a list, scheduled a meeting, and informed everyone of their roles. Producer no doubt!
This story made me ponder on what are the traits of those highly productive people, so I shuffled all the paperwork off my desk (less distractions), started researching, and created a top 5 list.
- Identify, prioritize, and Eat That Frog
Do you make a list? I love lists for two reasons, 1) it keeps you on task and 2) it is a sense of accomplishment when you can cross something off. Brian Tracy’s book Eat That Frog focuses on doing the biggest, hardest, and most important thing on your list first.
- Know your productive hour “PH”
Eliminate all distractions during your PH, from multi-tasking to minimizing your inbox, to a clutter free desk. My PH is early morning. I like to rise at 5:00am before anyone else in the house or neighborhood gets going. The only frustrating thing about being productive at this hour is being mindful to delay delivery on my emails, don’t SMS yet, and knowing that my vendors customer service centers are typically not open yet? My husband’s PH is at the end of the day when I can barely keep my eyes open. So, be mindful of when your PH hits you and use that time to your benefit.
- Automate your business
Apps like MailChimp, Constant Contact, HubSpot, etc will help a business to automate your email campaigns, Apps like Hootsuite can help you to schedule your social media posts and schedule your blog posts ahead of time. But, you can also automate your business by using Chatbots with auto-responses to FAQ’s or create a cloud-based helpdesk for your customers to find information and answers. You can automate your CRM and your UCAAS solution to automatically log your calls and your emails. You can invest in contact centers to have a single omnichannel to communicate across multi-platforms with your customers. At InteleCONNECT we use the phrase, “establishing connections” to showcase what we do for our clients. So, if you aren’t sure what tools are best to automate your business, we would love to help establish those connections for you!
- Create an environment that works best for you
As an extrovert, I love having people around. I like the sound of voices, I like the collaboration of working together in person, I love the culture that we have created at InteleCONNECT over the past 15 years…it is my MOJO! Others on our team have found with work from home/remote work over the past couple of years, that their best environment is also in their home environment. They are more productive when they have less distractions, noise, and people around and can focus more on the tasks at hand. Just as we must keep a work/life balance, we must also maintain a work at office/home balance too. We love helping business teams that need the tools to keep you connected while working remotely!
- Recharge
Last week while my husband was away, I found myself working from 5:00am to 7:30pm without many breaks. While I felt I got a LOT accomplished, there was not much for recharging throughout the day. It affected my sleep that night, and honestly for the next couple of nights. It is so important for us to recharge throughout the day. Take time to go for a walk, stand up and stretch, listen to music, eat lunch AWAY from your desk, meditate, whatever it is that will re-fuel your soul.
In case you are wondering, yes…it is 5:30am, I have devoured the Frog and washed it down with copious amounts of caffeine, placed the delayed emails in my outbox, checked those items off my list, and now is time for a stretch break before establishing connections with one of my networking groups!
