Work Smarter Not Harder

While in the military I often heard the phrase work smarter not harder. A sound piece of advice, something you might want to carry on to your life as an entrepreneur I imagine. Unfortunately for me this little piece of advice seemed to slip to unvisited depths of my brain as I entered into self employment several months ago. I managed to get so caught up in the growing business that I lost track of the easiest way to start accomplishing more and increasing profits. My workflow is bloated, my whole work day is bloated. Instead of easily downloading financial transactions on a daily basis I choose to let them pile up for a fews weeks and then tackle the accounting. Instead of creating snippets of code that I use on an almost daily basis, I choose to hand code them, every time!

Chunk it

Think about it. I let my financial transactions pile up for two weeks. Let’s say that on average I have two a day, after two weeks that is approximately twenty transactions give or take depending on if you count weekends. Twenty transactions all pile up and ready to be entered. You sit down to enter them and find yourself wasting time in two ways. One, if you are like me and account really isn’t your idea of a good time, you will probably find yourself procrastinating a bit at this point. At this point you will probably drift over to see what your friends are up to on twitter and before you no it you have put of the task for another hour. Second thing, with a pile like this staring in the face there is a good chance that a few things have gotten buried. Now you find yourself having to sift through pile, causing each transaction entry to take a bit longer than usual. It’s a no win situation. You have let an ant build a colony when you could have just handled the ant.

How do you tackle the beast before it multiplies. Simple, set aside a good 10 to 15 minutes at the end of each day for simple data entry. Break the process into smaller more manageable and less daunting chunks of time. You will probably ending up saving yourself an hour minimum over the course of two weeks. (Guess more like 2 to 3 hours)

Automate

Think about how you can cut down the time it takes to do regular tasks and then find a way to automate all or parts of them. This can go for the simplest of tasks, for me deciding to save a tiny code snippet that I use on a regular basis just might do the trick. If you start to add up all of these little tasks that are not automated, you will start to see a drastic improvement in production. Don’t cut corners, make it your own, but automate.

Reduce Waste

I can’t even begin to estimate how much waste I might have have on a typical day. Switching back and forth between browser windows, trailing off on a link totally unrelated to the search at hand, social networking. I know find myself doing simple things like opening a simple text file and pasting links to it for later reading. Keeps me focused on the task at hand, but lets me know that there is something of interest here that I should revisit later.

Social networking on the other hand is a touchy subject. It is in fact an integral part of my marketing plan and business model, but there is a point at which it becomes to much of a distraction. There has to be a way to cut down some of the waste involved in this arena. Find what works for you and begin reducing, turn your social networking time into smaller yet more meaningful bits. But beware, one thing I advise against is automating this process. It removes the personal touch that social networking is and people start to recognize this after awhile. It’s your avatar, but someone else is doing tweeting for you? Lame. That kind of trickery is reserved for myspace, where the most important thing in the world is the size of your friends list. Reduce but make it meaningful, that’s the key. Here’s a great ten part series on Social Media, I recommend you read it.

There is nothing wrong with finding little shortcuts in your daily workflow as long as the quality of the final product does not suffer. If you find a way to do something smarter, then buck the worn out habit and bring the new. Streamline your operation, and after you find yourself doing so for three weeks straight, go ahead and give yourself 4 hours of on that third Friday. It’s a reward for the new, more productive you!