What Successful Business Owners Do in 10 Minutes That Others Take Hours to Finish...

Have you ever wondered how some people seem to just breeze through their to-do list, ticking off tasks without missing a beat? And somehow your list seems to take hours to grind through?

You’re not alone, in fact I’d bet that even those who seem highly organised and efficient probably feel just like you every now and then. The difference is they’ve got a strategy to make sure that even when they’re not feeling at their most productive, they’re still ticking boxes with terrifying efficiency.

Join me as we deep dive into some of the tips and tricks that other business owners use and I share my own thoughts on how you can utilise them to give maximum impact in your business.

Focus on high impact tasks

Firstly - look at your list and figure out what will make the biggest impact. Just because something feels urgent, it doesn’t actually mean it’ll provide your business with any value. There’s a big difference between being busy and being productive, and it’s easy to allow ‘busywork’ tasks to eat up your time when you should be focusing on productive tasks.

Whether your high impact tasks fall into the ‘quick win’ category or ‘major project’, they’re the tasks that you need to be putting the majority of your time and energy into. Assign them to a time when you know you’ll be able to focus uninterrupted, and you’ll be working at your best. If you need 3 hours and enough caffeine to jumpstart a cart-horse to feel like you can focus, it’s probably not a great idea to put those tasks as something to tackle at 6am.

Busy work can wait. We’ve all got those tasks that take up our time, but don’t really move business forward. Reorganising files, getting lost in scrolling under the guise of ‘checking my LinkedIn’, or attending meetings that don’t really need your input can all be examples of this.

Have a purge. Look at that list and ask yourself what will REALLY move your business forward - and then action it!

Delegate like a pro

The truth is, most successful business owners probably aren’t dealing with their entire to-do lists themselves. True leadership comes from knowing where your skill set lies, and taking steps to handle any shortfall. We can’t all be great at everything, so embrace your own imperfections and outsource!

We often find that clients who are in creative industries might struggle with admin style tasks - staying on top of their inbox, data management, or even things like newsletters - but they’ll nail tasks like their social media because it feeds into where their talents lie. Similarly, (some, not all!) clients in fields such as finance tend to find their admin easier to handle than the more creative tasks.

The key is to identify where your weaknesses lie, and then come up with a strategy to accommodate that. It could be that you need to identify time on a weekly or monthly basis where you can sit down and focus on the tasks you find trickier, or it might be time to outsource to a virtual assistant (like me!) who can handle the tasks you find tricky with ease.

Decision making

How often have you procrastinated over making a decision? We’ve all done it - spending time overthinking, trying to foresee every possible outcome, only to miss an opportunity because we took too long. Even if you don’t miss an opportunity, it can still cause a bottleneck for any other decisions to be made.

Efficient, self-assured entrepreneurs make swift, informed decisions. The whole process of making a decision can be exhausting, so why give it more energy than you need to? Gather the facts you need, use them to make the decision, and move on. It’s easy to think that the longer you spend on a decision, the better the outcome will be - but that’s rarely the case. It might be that you need to spend some time gathering specific information to help you come to a decision, but once you’ve got the facts, make a decision and move on!