I don’t think I have ever had a full day to work from home. Don’t get me wrong, I do work quite a bit on my business. But between having two kids in school, taking classes for my MBA program, volunteering with my church, and handling most of our family and life management, my day rarely looks like a 9-5 situation. Honestly, I love this, and over the years I’ve found that I thrive on work squeezed into shorter sprints. Give me a baby nap time or a quick hour during dance practice, and I can bust out more work than if I am sitting at my computer for hours. It’s part of how my brain works.
It is also part of my productivity cycle. I realize this is only possible because of the productivity measures I have put in place in my business over the years. So if you are also squeezing in growing your business around life, these productivity tips will make running your digital product business from home a much better experience.
5 Digital Business Productivity Tips
1. Plan Your Next Work Session Before Shutting Down
Before you shut down your work session, make sure you have a map and a plan for your next day, your next week, your next session, whatever it is that you’re going to sit down to do next. Sometimes I get stuck working in little chunks throughout the day. I do a couple of hours in the morning. I do a couple more hours in the afternoon. And if I’m spending the first 15, 20 minutes just trying to figure out what I’m supposed to be working on, this severely cuts into my time.
So before I shut down a working session, I like to map out the next couple of steps. This way, when I sit down to work next, I know exactly what I can start on. This helps with motivation and that initial feeling of productivity. The process has really helped me to streamline mini-sessions of work throughout the day.
2. Align Your Calendars
If you have other people in your life or in your home that you need to plan around, make sure you have weekly, daily, or however often you need planning sessions with them so you can align your calendars. I know, for me, this is especially true right now, in the midst of the spring busy school season. If I am trying to record or get focused work done, it can be really hard with everyone coming and going all the time.
My family sits down once a week to map out our calendars, align our schedules, and plan together. It helps when I’m sitting down to work on something important not to be derailed by the rest of my life. This is also true if you have roommates, co-workers, or other family members that you’re trying to work around. Getting on the same calendar page together is vital, even though it’s your business (not theirs). Involving the other people who share your space is a really important element for staying organized and efficient at home.
3. Set Phone Alarms
I live and die by my phone alarms! That isn’t even an exaggeration. If you want to stay efficient and organized when you’re working from home, set alarms on your phone. I often have 13 alarms set on my phone for all kinds of things throughout the day. This might sound crazy, but it works really well for me. I set alarms for meetings, for picking kids up from school, for things I need to remember, and for scheduled times I’ve set aside to accomplish tasks. I set an alarm if I need to make an important phone call, respond to an email, or do anything that I don’t want to forget.
Because I do not have a boss, I have given my phone permission to boss me around a little, and it has significantly increased my productivity. My phone dings, and it says it’s time to do this. Barring a major emergency, that’s when I sit down to do it. I’ve even started setting alarms to post on social media throughout the day.
It is WAY too easy for me to start my day, and then all of a sudden it’s four o’clock, and I’ve missed half of the things I wanted to see happen!
Alarms can be incredibly helpful for focus time as well. If I’m going to sit down, I want to devote 20 minutes to really busting out this one thing. I’ll set an alarm or timer on my phone for 20 minutes. I know when it goes up that my time on that task is done. This helps me focus while I’m working and not have to keep looking at the clock (or the distracting phone) as I go.
4. Try Task Blocking
Instead of time blocking, which I know is very popular, I have started task blocking. How many times have you sat down to do something, a task or project, and you were working in a time blocking mentality, i.e., I have 1 hour for this. Then whatever it was that you were going to do took significantly longer, or sometimes shorter than you thought it was going to take.
This ends up throwing your whole like time block system off. This is especially true as digital entrepreneurs, because we’re wearing all the hats at once. You could be recording a podcast, ordering products, or creating ad copy on any given day. Knowing exactly how much time things are going to take you feels like you need a crystal ball. That is because it doesn’t actually work!
Instead of trying to fit whatever hexagon-shaped tasks I am working on into a time block, I let them make their own shapes with task blocking.
Task Blocking vs. Time Blocking
So let’s just say I’m sitting down to work in the morning. I work in the morning before the kids get up from about 5 to 7 most mornings. I’ll have a task set out for that time. If I don’t get that task done, I don’t need to feel bad about it or wish it fit in my time box. Instead, I just note next time I sit down, this is where I’m starting again. And I work on that task until it’s done. Once that task is done, I move on to the next. This allows me to accomplish what I need in my business without feeling constrained by time.
It’s also really great because sometimes tasks do take less time than you think. When that happens, you already have another task lined up, so you can stay productive with the limited time you have.
5. Break Every Project Down
I break everything I am working on down into the smallest, smallest steps possible. This has become a great way to ensure I always know what to do next. A great example of that is the monthly planners I use. I put some of our biggest goals for the month on them, then break them down into very small steps. For the month of May, one of my goals is to get samples for our next year planner launch. Here are the steps I have broken down:
- Find 5 suppliers (note their contact information)
- Decide the exact paper quality
- Get in touch with my agent and give her the contact info
- Find out new shopping rates
- Ask for samples of the binding
- Get a copy edit back of the text for readthrough
- Send the finalized copy to the suppliers
- Get tracking numbers and sample date
- Look over the samples and narrow down to two
- Start negotiations
If I had written “get samples” on my list for that day, it wouldn’t have actually told me what I needed to be working on. Instead, breaking the bigger task down into SIMPLE ACTIONABLE STEPS gives me a marching plan I can fill in during my mini work sessions as I have time. The more and more you can break things down, the easier it’s going to be for you to be able to accomplish those goals because you’re working in little tiny steps that you can actually do and see progress in.
I hope these five tips have helped. Just pick one to focus on this week, and it will help you accomplish your goals while maintaining a normal (sometimes crazy) life.
If you want to try my monthly planner template, pop your email in right here, and I will send it to you. – Victoria