Founding A New Business Startup? — 5 Tips For Optimizing Workflow & Productivity
We all realize that starting a business isn’t easy. Even more so when you’re actually going through the process itself. In the current age although unemployment is still a rising issue, the rate of new businesses being formed and people going the self-employed route has also significantly increased. With this in mind productivity needs to be a real focus for new business owners starting out for the first time.
During 2017–2018, the number of new entrepreneurs has risen dramatically across the world. In comparison, the rise from previous years show a consecutive shift upwards, for individuals founding setting out alone and establishing new business ventures.
With the above being noted, it would be fair to say that there are many people working well over the average 35–40 hr week to get their new startup up and running, or to get some skin in the game.
Furthermore, new entrepreneurs will find that they in fact work much harder and longer than this to increase their productivity, with many finding organization and time management an utter nightmare!
Below, we list 5 tips to help you in those departments and greatly improve your workflow.
Grab your coffee and let’s get to the run down!
1. Planning
Planning out your objectives is essential in any Business operation. Things like S.M.A.R.T and S.W.O.T analysis aren’t just fancy acronyms used to explain your idea. They are much more and serve as the route to everything you see in your ‘big dream’, business or project.
Making other project planning tools and documents, such as spreadsheets and Gantt Charts also help immensely. These things can really help you pitch your project/business goals in the right way.
If you’re not sure on how to create an effective plan for your business or project, here is a powerful tool that can help you learn about planning and do so effectively.
Built mostly for project team planning and management. Trello has many fresh and intuitive features to help manage and plan tasks within your team.
Trello boards allow you to ‘pin’ tasks to boards, assign team members to tasks, set reminders, create team documents, plans and more… All of this is wrapped in an easy to use interface and system. Your team should good off to a good start and always be on the same page!
Cost: FREE (Up to one team, with 10 members)
2. Organization
No matter how many times you hear it, the saying rings true every time. Organization is key! After planning the steps needed to take your venture to a new level, you’ll want to organize and carry out tasks in the most efficient manner. Here is an amazing site that can assist you in that department.
Probably one of the simplest yet effective platforms out there! Don’t be fooled by the easy to use design. Monday has been packed with additional features which will help you and your team manage daily project/business tasks with ease and simplicity.
The interface itself, notification structure and easy color coding make organizing, tracking and timing tasks a complete breeze. The platform itself is designed to remove all the complications that go along with managing all types of workloads, small and large. At the same time it will keep your team engaged on task completion.
Throw away your wall calendar and get this up on a 50in display, now!
Cost: FREE (14 days), packages available from £22 pm thereafter
3. Time Management
OK, so woke up at 6am, followed the 3 minute rule before getting out of bed, showered, made your morning tea or coffee and toast. Then you brushed your teeth with one trouser leg on, smartened up for the day, got the kids ready and completed the school run. You’ve planned to do some paperwork or tackle some big tasks today. So, here you are at the computer, ready to go. All of a sudden you get a phone call from a client and as you load up your desktop the email notifications come through, you start to read them and social media notifications come through…first Telegram, then Instagram, Twitter, Whatsapp…STOP!
It can be extremely difficult to manage time effectively when starting out in any new venture. Thankfully, we can suggest two things that should help you manage your time more effectively.
SaveMyTime
The SaveMyTime app tracks your daily activities effortlessly and gives deep insight into how your spend time.
The app allows you to setup custom tasks, custom notifications, subcategories and also syncs to many popular calendar services (premium). The app it self is able to display analytics for your day to day tasks and rest periods. This makes it clear what activities can be altered to save you time. Keeping you on track with your planning and routines.
Cost: FREE, Premium features available from £1.49pm
Tomato Timer
More of a website, or web app, Tomato Timer is a basic JS timer that follows the principles of the Pomodoro technique. The Pomodoro technique is a time management technique developed by Francesco Cirillo and widely adopted by many professionals across the world.
This simple yet effective method is designed to get the most out of your productivity, giving you the perfect amount of time for breaks, in between concentrated bursts of productiveness. If there is anything you should be using to manage you actual work/study time than it’s this.
Cost: FREE
4. Automation
Trying to grow your company’s social media accounts, but cant find interesting content? Do you sometimes end up sitting in front of your phone for an hour just to keep activity up on Twitter or Instagram? If any of these is you then you need to apply some automation to your accounts, as I’m sure you need that time to deal with more pressing or important issues.
Automating your accounts correctly, is no easy feat! However, this app should do you wonders in getting things off the ground.
Many of our clients at Social Ripe ask us to recommend good apps they can use to boost they’re profile productivity, Crowdfire is 9/10 the go to app.
Cost: Free (One profile per platform), Premium packages available from $9.99 pm
5. Assistance
It can be very difficult, with the all the tasks of a day, to keep up with all your new customer queries. This includes juggling calls and checking your email box. You sometimes would prefer a quick and easy way of conveniently dealing with new customers.
It would help of course if you could find out as much about customer needs as possible, before responding directly. It would most likely also be a bonus to keep the customer engaged at the time that they visit your site, but what if your busy at that time?
However, you may not be able to afford a PA or VA as you’ve just started out. That’s where Drift comes in.
Drift is a website API/plugin, which allows webmasters to easily create they’re own chat/support applet and put it on their website. The applet is fully customizable, with the ability to add and organize teams, to respond to certain questions or at certain times.
Maybe your wondering what this has to do with assistance. Well that isn’t all…
In addition, Drift also features its own easy to program chat bot. It will respond to and fully ascertain a potential customers needs, before subsequently taking a certain action, such as emailing you and your team. Furthermore, it provides the customer with relevant information or links to help things along. Drift has a good series of things in their add on suite. These tools are designed to make automation, data processing and building bots easy for even the most inexperienced of users. What’s more? It’s Free!
Cost: Free, Custom premium packages available
Hopefully the above tools can help you get your new business on track with all it’s productivity for the future!
Thanks for reading!
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Originally published at socialripe.com on September 11, 2018.
