7 Simple, powerful productivity tips!

Successful business development is all about achieving measurable progress in reasonable time.

Here are 7 productivity tips, to help you get the very most from your working day:

1. Break your yearly business goals down into monthly and weekly goals. This makes it easier to ensure you are on track. When you have months and months to achieve something, without measurement points along the way, it’s too easy to drift off course.
2. Plan your day and then work to that plan. The plan needs to incorporate the goals in the previous point. Set out what you need to achieve and make that your priority for the day.
3. Take intelligent action. One reason people make less progress than they should, is that they put off the really challenging stuff.
4. Look for the things that suck the time out of your day, unnecessarily. Then, replace them with productive alternatives. Common culprits include; over-long phone calls, attending unnecessary meetings, poor advance planning and engaging people in conversation who have nothing better to do than talk all day.
5. Run your email, don’t let it run you. Check for email when you have time to deal with it. Respond to email when it works for you, not the second it arrives. Use as many words as needed, but no more.
6. There’s a lot of very toxic business advice out there. Think hard before you accept something you read and apply it to your business. Otherwise, you could be working hard and getting nowhere. Even worse, you could be going backwards. Don’t confuse things like Twitter follower counts, with competence. Anyone can get 100,000 followers, using autofollow software.
7. Use social media during your down time. I do a lot of my Google+ and Twitter updates and replies, when I am waiting in line, waiting for lunch at the local coffee shop and when I arrive early for an appointment etc. It allows me to keep connected with my networks throughout the day, without eating into time allocated to other work. It also means I need to block off less social media time, when planning my day.