In a fast-paced world, it’s essential to keep your online business in top shape. With meetings to organize and attend, emails to answer, and to run your day-to-day operations, there never seems to be enough time in the day.
The last thing you want is for your to-do list to be longer at the day’s end than when you started. With the right tools and hacks, you can keep your business productivity at its peak. We’re going to give you some real-world productivity tips for online businesses to keep your employees and your online business running smoothly.
10 Productivity Tips for Your Online Business
1. Time-Management Apps
Managing your time efficiently and effectively is key to staying on track. Most of the time, people underestimate the amount of time they need to complete a task. This leads to fewer tasks being completed during your workday than you intended and inevitably leaves your deadlines lagging behind.
Time management apps can help you track your time on tasks and help you plan your days more efficiently. They can also show you the functions that need streamlining (such as checking emails) so you spend your time on more productive tasks.
2. Maintain a Dedicated Workspace
Where you spend your time impacts how productive you are. One study showed that employees who are content with their physical work environment have better work outcomes than those who weren’t. This applies to anyone working from home.
Choose a spot to work on your online business that makes you more productive. Don’t eat or take breaks sitting at your desk and try not to work in your bedroom. This will help you to stay productive at work and find much-needed rest during your downtime.
3. Be Organized About Your Work Tasks
When you’re making your to-do list for the day or week, put the most important things at the top. Often we find ourselves drawn to the simpler tasks on the list and delay doing more time-consuming or complicated jobs. This strategy won’t help you be productive in the long term.
If you take on the more complex tasks first, you will be surprised how much momentum it builds for your day. You can use tools such as Google Task if it helps to have your to-do list on your computer screen.
4. Advance Schedule Your Social Media Posts
More than likely, you are maintaining several social media accounts to promote your online business. If you are trying to post everything in real-time, this can be a time sucker.
You can use social media planning tools like HootSuite or Social Pilot to schedule and publish your social media posts ahead of time. This way, your posts can be taken care of for an entire week or even a month.
5. Self-Care
We all know better, but many of us neglect to incorporate self-care into our routines. This can be especially true if you are an entrepreneur with little spare time. It’s essential, however, for preventing burnout.
By scheduling some time for self-care, you will find yourself more productive when you are working, rather than just slugging away at your endless task list.
Engaging in self-care doesn’t have to be complicated or time-consuming. Start by making sure you’re getting enough sleep, taking regular breaks, and eating healthy meals, or trying a meditation app like Calm or Headspace to help you unwind.
6. Outsource or Delegate Mundane Jobs
If you find yourself with an endless list of boring, mundane jobs to keep your online business running, consider outsourcing some of the work. You can find thousands of freelancers on sites like Fiverr.
Sending emails and answering social media questions can take your time away from the things you should be focusing on. If you don’t have a team of employees, consider hiring a freelancer with the appropriate skills.
This is also important in considering the value of your time. As a business owner, you can’t be highly skilled in all tasks. If you are not good at website design, it could take you 10 hours to design a webpage, while it would take a skilled expert 4.
While hiring an employee or freelancer will cost some money, it will free you to focus on what you enjoy about running your online business.
7. Automate Marketing Campaigns
Automating your marketing campaign allows you to schedule your online content or ad postings without your attention.
Emails, pop-ups, and social media campaigns can all be set to run on a schedule automatically. This will avoid you having to constantly check your accounts to make sure things are done on time.
8. Organize Your Day into Time Chunks
Moving back and forth between tasks can be time-consuming. Focusing on one thing will help you finish each job in a shorter amount of time because you aren’t distracted by multiple things. This is where task batching comes in.
Say your tasks for the day include checking and answering emails, packaging and shipping your products for the day's orders, and managing your social media ads.
Instead of doing all these tasks as they come up, you can try checking your emails first thing in the morning, after your lunch break, and before you end your workday, rather than checking them every time you get a notification.
Select two times during the day to check your social networks. Set aside a couple of hours to drop off packages for delivery or prepare your shipping products.
9. Monitor, Measure, Change, Repeat
Regularly monitor and measure your productivity and efficiency to see where you are lacking. This will help you determine which areas need improvement or which tasks are taking too long. Google Analytics is an excellent tool for seeing which of your social media campaigns generate the most traffic.
If you find, for example, that Instagram is generating more business than Twitter, you can then focus your efforts on your Instagram page. You can also determine what your hourly wage is and monitor how long individual tasks take to complete.
Tasks that are taking too long may justify delegation to another employee or outsourcing the job.
10. Use Technology to Your Advantage
There are so many devices and apps available to help you be more productive, improve your online business, and employ self-care. Take advantage of the technology and use it to your advantage. Some examples include:
- Using a device like a Fitbit or a fitness tracker app to monitor your activity, sleep, and eating habits
- Financial services and apps to track spending
- Virtual assistants or virtual scheduling to keep on top of your schedule
- Apps like Coach.me can help you with goal setting like increased productivity and tracks your progress accordingly
FAQ
How Do You Increase Employee Productivity?
Two factors determine how successful an employee is at work. Productivity is the amount of work an employee completes and effectiveness, which is the effort the employee puts in his or her work. If you find your employee’s productivity declining, there are several ways to improve it.
Improve Working Conditions
This is the easiest way to make your employees more productive. Natural lighting, bright colors, and plants have all been shown to improve workspace productivity.
Optimize Your Emails
Business owners spend about 13 hours of their week composing emails. If you multiply that by the number of employees you have, that is how much unproductive time could be spent elsewhere.
Select a time each day for dealing with emails and communicate this window to your employees. Make sure your emails are short and simple and restricted to being sent during working hours.
Optimize Your Meetings
Try emailing instead of holding meetings for everything. Keep your meetings smaller with only the necessary people and set time limits so they don’t end up as endless chat sessions.
Allow Employees Flexible Scheduling Options
Employees who have flexible scheduling often have much higher productivity levels. Each of us works best at different times of the day. Try setting a total number of work hours per day or week and allow your employees to determine when they put in those hours.
Provide Training Opportunities
Training and development will improve your employee’s knowledge base and improve their productivity levels as an extension.
Avoid Micromanaging
Task delegation is an important way for business owners and managers to open time in their schedule and be more productive. Once you have delegated a task, however, try not to micromanage its completion. Make your expectations clear when you delegate the job and leave it to your employee to complete.
What is the Impact of Productivity?
Productivity is defined as the efficiency of production. Levels of productivity are essential because they directly impact the output of your online business.
With regards to business, productivity is primarily measured in income. Higher productivity will lead to higher income and business growth. Low productivity will negatively affect revenue and business growth.
What are Your Must-Have Productivity Tools – Our Top Recommendations
Here are a few must-have productivity tools for your online business:
Microsoft 365
This is one of the original productivity tools, but it is still one of the best. The newer Microsoft365 version adds in cloud-based components, making it easier to move between devices and platforms for more efficiency.
Kumospace
Kumospace is an innovative online meeting platform that enhances your remote collaboration. With seamless video conferencing, screen sharing and more, Kumospace provides a comprehensive solution for your digital communication needs. Its intuitive user interface and high quality audio and video make it a great choice for teams of all sizes. Discover a new dimension in online collaboration with Kumospace.
Monday.com
Monday.com is designed for collaboration. It can manage, organize, and share everything from basic to-do lists to big project management tasks.
The Pocket app allows you to store content for later, offline viewing. This will give you the ability to save all the cool content you see online for a time when you can examine it more thoroughly.
LastPass
A password manager app that saves across all devices. It has form filling functionalities built-in as well to save you time.
Social Pilot
The go-to social media management tool.
Join.me
An easy-to-use app for organizing and recording meetings. It also has screen-sharing features.
Conclusion
Keeping productivity at its peak is essential for the success of your online business. Once you understand the importance of productivity for you and your employees, you can take strategic steps to maximize your inputs. By constantly evaluating the areas that need improvement, you can optimize your business's production and improve workplace efficiency.
