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5 strategies that can help improve your startup productivity

5 strategies that can help improve your startup productivity

While challenges are inevitable, these productivity tips can help you stay focused and motivated

If you’re in the early stages of founding a startup, you probably feel inundated with tasks. As you juggle responsibilities like networking with investors, raising funds, and seeking out talented employees, you might find that you’ve fallen behind schedule in completing your overall goals. Here are some of my favorite productivity strategies that will help you achieve these goals effectively and efficiently, stay focused on the mission at hand, and get your startup back on track.

1. Strengthen your team

A strong team leads to a collaborative culture–and a collaborative group workplace culture, in turn, leads to employees getting more done.

While investing time and money in team bonding might not seem like a priority for a brand new startup, such efforts are critical for developing a dedicated base of employees who are not only talented, but who also believe in your company’s mission.

In addition to doing the usual team-building activities, like taking your team out for a meal or fun outing, you can adopt a more team-centric approach to your management strategy to help the team develop a sense of unity. Have weekly meetings with your team at the end of each week not only to plan ahead for the following week, but also to celebrate their mutual efforts from the previous few days. Give praise to your team as a whole, rather than isolating your praise to specific individuals. Resist the formation of cliques within your startup by encouraging all team members to share and discuss their insights and opinions with one another. Finally, bring employees together within the office by keeping comfortable chairs and snacks in a central location.

2. Cut the fluff

Is your team doing a task that isn’t absolutely essential? Are people going through extra steps that ultimately aren’t important to project completion? If so, your employees probably aren’t operating in the most efficient way possible. Even if these employees are productive at work each day, they might not be achieving your company’s goals on time simply because there are obstacles slowing them down.

To remove these obstacles and streamline the workflow, look for ways to cut out excess tasks. Maybe your employees are going through an extra step, like getting a task approved by an additional person, that isn’t really adding any value. Or maybe you’re assigning tasks or obligations that aren’t really necessary, like scheduling a detailed one hour meeting when a quick 15-minute check-in would suffice. As a budding startup, you can best jump-start your business if you direct all your focus, employees, and resources only to the most critical tasks.

Also read: Stop fake productivity, and get down to accomplishing really meaningful work

3. Aim for open and transparent communication

One non-essential element that you can cut out of the workflow is repeated explanation and overview of project tasks. You should have a system that enables employees to collaborate with one another without explaining the project’s status from scratch each time.

A simple and effective method for keeping all employees consistently updated is to have a board of tasks accessible to everyone, whether it’s a physical whiteboard in the office, a digital display on a TV, or a shared online board accessible via personal computers. This allows for complete transparency so that all employees know what’s going on with each project, task, and sub-task at any given time.

For example, Avi Wortzel, R&D Group Manager of Conduit, noted that the company’s employees became more productive when they stopped using emails as their main internal communication method and instead adopted a shared digital management platform, so that all employees had access to tasks. The result was that employees were able to more smoothly hand off tasks between one another, without feeling left in the dark or having to explain and re-explain the status of a project to each individual team member.

4. Plan from broad to specific

Whether you’re just entering the tech industry or are a seasoned entrepreneur, it can be daunting to tackle a big problem or approach a huge project. No matter your level of experience, it’s hard to know exactly how to create a project timeline and to divide up the project into smaller, achievable steps.

While there might be initial steps that are immediately obvious to you, resist the temptation to get those out of the way before you develop a clearer, more holistic picture of the project overall. The first stage of tackling a new project should be planning, not initiation, so sit down with your team and start with a plan.

Also read: Planning to bootstrap your business? Follow these 7 tips

The key is to plan from broad to specific. Start by thinking about your broadest, most abstract questions, such as your project’s purpose. Then, think about the goals you’ll need to achieve that purpose. Once you know what your goals are, determine the tasks, month by month, that you will need to have completed to achieve those goals. Based on these broader tasks, you can then set smaller, more specific action items.

5. Set smaller goals

While we’re tempted to tackle the biggest tasks from the get-go, sometimes that’s biting off more than we can chew. Opting for smaller goals instead isn’t a sign that we’re lazy or unmotivated. On the contrary, choosing smaller goals requires a healthy degree of self-discipline, and it actually makes us more productive. Rather than leaving work at the end of the day feeling discouraged and unmotivated from not having completed our goals, we can finish the workday feeling satisfied, encouraged, and enthusiastic about completing the project the next day.

As a guide for setting small, achievable goals, you can use the acronym SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. The goals you set should meet each of these five qualifications.

For example, when you created your overall project plan, you might have decided that one of your broad goals for the month of April is to “call leads.” You can then use the SMART acronym to make that goal more precise and attainable, like “Call 5 leads per day between April 2 and April 6.” It’s good to keep your long-term project timeline relatively flexible, so you should establish these specific goals week by week.

An important part of getting your company off the ground is to have productivity strategies to guide you along the way. While challenges and feelings of discouragement are inevitable for any entrepreneur, these productivity strategies can help you stay focused on the tasks at hand and motivated to achieve your startup goals.

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