Time waits for none. And who would understand this better than the business managers of modern corporate where deadlines are thrown at them every single hour.

If you are one such manager, you might be familiar with the situation where your to-do list keeps getting longer & your strategic priorities are never satisfactorily met.

Well, you can’t just buy more time… neither can you slow it down. So the best possible solution here is to find out those activities which waste more time & give you negligible productivity in return. Your chances of going closer to your goal will surely increase then.

Let’s discuss some of the common business habits that should be avoided:

Juggling between Emails, Chats & Social Media

If you’re handling the support team, customers will keep emailing you all the time. Your team will be pinging you their questions every minute plus you also have to give a significant amount of attention to your social media activities now-a-days.

All of this sounds interesting but after a while, it gets tiresome. And then there’s the fear of you getting distracted from your main goals of taking the company forward.

What you can do:

• Pay attention to the importance of a request: Not every email, message or note deserve to be given equal importance. Prioritise the ones which you feel are ‘Urgent’ & divert your time accordingly.
• Your don’t disturb time: In today’s digital world where we’re always surrounded by technology & gadgets… it’s actually a good idea to go into ‘Aeroplane Mode’ for sometime everyday. Just do away with your mobile & close your inbox for atleast 30 mins a day. It sounds strange, but you’ll surely like it. Sip a cup of coffee & think about the core business goals.
• Delegate if required: If you’ve been doing something for a long time, doesn’t mean you’ll keep doing it forever. As a manager your plate will only get heavier with every passing day. Hence, it’s important for you to decide if it’s time to delegate some of your work to your team.

Waiting for the Next Project

Even if your to-do list keeps getting longer, the same might not be true for all of your team members working with you. Let’s just say that not everyone is as self-motivated as we are. Yes some of your resources will find opportunities to keep themselves busy by doing something productive. But if someone’s playing the wait-game & expecting a home-delivery of the next bunch of tasks… it’s just a wastage of resources for your organisation.

That’s when you need to be pro-active & do things like:

• Group discussions: You should always encourage having regular group discussions with the entire team to analyse or review the work. You never know where a great idea will come from. As they say, “A lot can happen over coffee”.
• Keep everyone in loop: It’s always a wise idea to keep a few people aware of what you’re doing. First, it will make them feel important. Second, in case you’re unavailable… the show keeps on running. More importantly, your team will know what’s important to you & work accordingly. Very useful in expediting the work.

The Minutes-of-meetings

If you think you spend very little time in organizing your MOMs, give it another thought! This is one of those tasks where people actually spend more time than they realise.

The common process starts with creating a meeting agenda, then sharing with all the stakeholders of that meeting. Once the meeting is over, you then carefully spend a few minutes organising the notes you took all along. Then you figure out all the action-items & punch everything manually into your project management tool.

Here’s a better approach:

• Try to record the entire conversation that happens during the meeting.
• Have one of your junior team members listen to it & list down all possible tasks.
• You do something productive during the new-found free time.

Moving between multiple Apps

Most of the CRM users don’t realise the potential of their CRM & keep juggling between a bunch of applications to get their work done.

It’s important to get hold of an agile CRM like Wakeupsales that’s good enough to fulfill all your business requirements. Not only will it streamline your entire pipeline, but also save you loads of time. Ranked as the #1 CRM of the Year 2017 by Accurate Reviews, Wakeupsales CRM offers you a simple CRM tool along with Project Management & Gmail integration all under one roof.

If that’s not enough for you… there’s a lot more on offer inside the Wakeupsales CRM, such as:

• Web to Lead (Website) Integration
• Invoice Management
• SendGrid Integration
• Lead Event Tracking
• Amazon SES Integration
• MailChimp Integration
• Quickbooks Integration

& lot more…

Your list of less-productive things at work might be completely different from mine. I’d love to have a discussion about it. Please leave your comments below 🙂