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4 Ways to Spring-Clean Your Business Processes

By Gunjan Saini | Appointment | No Comments

Spring cleaning isn’t necessarily the year’s most fun activity, but it’s certainly one of the most important. We all need a little motivation to clean those hard-to-reach areas and finally organize the coat closet we’ve avoided all year. After all the hard work, it’s nice to feel more comfortable in our homes again.

For business owners, spring cleaning is for much more than just routine tidying and organizing. Businesses need to continue to improve and become more efficient if they want to remain relevant with their customers. If you’re not spring cleaning your business processes, you can fall behind.

This spring, it’s time to look for ways to streamline and improve your business processes. This means keeping the processes that help your businesses to be more efficient and getting rid of what’s not working so you can take on more customers, retain new and existing ones, and increase business revenue. Let’s get started:

1. Out With the Old

It can be unfortunately easy to fall into the trap of amassing subscription services with the intent to use all of them. However, more often than not, there will be at least one service that you continue to pay for without getting much value in return. You’re going to have to learn to let go of some of these services even if it’s difficult to do so.

Start by inventorying all of the services you pay for. Include every piece of customer relationship management software, payment program, and streaming service listed under your business. Which ones are you actually using regularly? If your knowledge management software is only getting updated once every month or two, you’re probably better off saving that money and canceling the subscription.

Even if some of the products you have look useful on paper, too many moving parts can be difficult to manage and even counterproductive. Your business will run a lot more smoothly when it only has what is necessary pushing it forward.

2. In With the New

In some cases, your problem might be that you’re not using enough subscription software services to your advantage. Technology is wonderful, and it can add a lot to your business when implemented properly. In this scenario, spring cleaning is accomplished by adding something new.

Take online appointment software, for example. This tech solution will keep track of customer information and make it much easier for customers to book appointments on their own. You can get rid of stacks of paper and can free up your phone lines by enabling more self-service. Just by adding this one solution, you can make your business process flow a lot more easily.

Be careful not to overload your business, though, or you’ll have to go back to step one again. Less can be more in some cases, but something is almost always better than nothing.

3. Get an Audit

A business audit will put a fresh set of eyes on the inner workings of your organization. A trained professional can take a look at your business and tell you exactly where your inefficiencies lie and give recommendations on how to fix them. Just having their expert opinion and insight can be a helpful place to start.

An auditor can also tell you what you’re doing right. In the process of spring cleaning your business processes, you don’t want to inadvertently mess with something that was working before. Your audit will help you take note of the good aspects of your business processes so you can preserve and enhance them.

An annual business audit may be the spring tradition that your company needs to reach the next level. Such audits can help you stay on top of your game by placing a trusted professional by your side for guidance and support.

4. Reevaluate Your Goals

The goals that you set in the first year you started your business are probably outdated now. When your goals change, so should your processes. Otherwise, you’ll end up treading water instead of making real progress forward.

When you launched your business, your goal might have simply been to break even and get back your investment. Once you’ve accomplished that, your next goal should be to start turning a profit. In order to do so, you’ll need to make changes to your business processes that either cut down on expenses or generate more revenue.

Inflation must also be taken into account. Prices fluctuate over time, and the business process that worked years ago might be too expensive to maintain now. With the rising price of gas, for example, in-person sales calls may need to go virtual. Not only can you make your business more efficient with process changes like these, you can help it to become more cost-effective as well.

Spring only lasts so long, so make some plans to start cleaning up your business processes as soon as you can. This will put you in a great position for success throughout the rest of the year.

Image Credit: Julia Filirovska; Pexels; Thank you!

Spring Clean Your Schedule: 4 Steps to Greater Productivity

By Jon Bradshaw | Scheduling | No Comments

Modern life is hectic. If you’re not careful, it can become a whirlwind of appointments, notifications, and deadlines. In this state of disorganization, it’s easy to push aside some of your basic needs.

Working some of these basics back into your schedule is a good place to start, but it should be part of a broader picture of resetting your priorities. And there’s no time like the spring to get that done.

Truly prioritizing allows you to tidy up your schedule, reorganize your days, and, ultimately, achieve more in life. It’s not complicated, but it does require a little effort.

Create a master list

We have different priorities. There are daily tasks that need attention, targets to hit for the week, and things that need to get accomplished within a month.

The tricky part is that these competing demands rarely line up, and it’s all too easy to focus on what’s most urgent or right in front of you while ignoring the long-term items. To get a handle on these tasks, you need to get everything down in one place.

Step one is to make a master list — a document, app, or a good old piece of paper where all of your tasks are listed.

This is in keeping with productivity consultant David Allen’s “Get Things Done” methodology, which emphasizes getting your to-dos out of your head in a systematized way that you can refer to later. This frees your mind of any distractions that might stop you from working efficiently. It also creates a foundation for step two.

Separate your “shoulds” from your “musts”

As self-development author Brian Tracey says, “there’s never enough time to do everything, but there’s always enough time to do the most important thing.”

With your master list neatly laid out, you can step back and review it in terms of what you should do as opposed to things you must do. What’s the difference?

Well, shoulds are habits, behaviors, and ideas that come from other people. These pesky shoulds permeate your brain, and they come from social conditioning, the people you follow on Linkedin, the ads you saw last week, etc.

On the other hand, musts are the habits, behaviors, and ideas that originate from a sense of what’s important to you. These things are deeply personal, and they have to get done to achieve big goals and to become the best version of yourself.

The problem is that people often confuse shoulds with musts. Without intentionality, we tend to get overwhelmed by the former and put the latter off. For example, scheduling downtime to do things that make you happy is a must, but the nearly endless stream of shoulds can detract from that.

When you say “yes” to things on your schedule, make sure they aren’t at the expense of the bigger, more important, long-term items. In doing so, you can reprioritize your schedule to revolve around what matters and reduce the amount of time spent on trivial tasks.

Clean up your physical environment

Starting a fresh schedule this spring would be incomplete without cleaning up your physical surroundings. Clutter builds up over time, and taking care of the spaces you inhabit on a daily basis can do wonders for your productivity.

Be sure to clean up your office desk this spring. Get rid of the unnecessary documents and trinkets you’ve collected over the last year. Tidy up your home so you aren’t constantly trying to squeeze chores into your schedule.

Decluttering reduces anxiety and gives you a feeling of self-efficacy that can translate to your daily tasks. Do not neglect your physical environment when you are revamping your schedule.

Build supportive habits & structures

If you’re going to spend the time and energy to clean up your schedule and to refocus on your musts, you need a plan to support these changes.

There are a variety of ways you can approach this. Here are a few:

Develop a proactive morning routine
Tackle the most difficult things first
Control how your availability is displayed
Spend time each evening planning the next day
Practice the art of saying “no”
Keep your workspace clutter-free
Remember the sunk cost fallacy

Doing these things matter because you are only as good as your habit systems. In his book “Atomic Habits,” James Clear puts it this way: “Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity.”

Everyone thinks they know what’s important to them, but many still get swamped by the minutiae of life. The response is simple: Stop and list it all out. Prioritize ruthlessly, declutter, and then build habits to support your desired schedule.