Simplicity and Productivity Go Together Like PB&J
As adults, our lives are more complex than they were when we were children. We have more responsibilities, more things to keep track of, and sometimes we yearn for simpler times.
Like when we were kids. When life was more about playtime and fun and not about responsibilities. Obviously life isn;t going backward, but there are some things you can do to make your life simpler.
Reducing the amount of clutter – whether it’s physical, mental, in the office or in the home – frees up your brain and gives you some breathing space. It reduces mental load so you have more capacity for focused, productive work.
This week is Simplify Your Life Week, so how much can you simplify?
Simplify your email to be more productive
Answering emails as they come in might have made sense in the 1990s when we weren’t inundated with emails, but clearly that’s no longer the case. Plus, your brain doesn’t like to switch between different types of tasks, so batching them all together is more productive.
You can let people know you received their email by setting up an autoresponder. Most people already do this when they’re out of the office, letting people know that they're out and who to contact in case the sender needs immediate help.
It’s a similar process, but instead of activating it only when you’re on vacation, you’ll have your autoresponder running all the time. It just lets the sender know that you’ve received their email and will respond later.
You can add your email reading time(s) to the autoresponder, but you don’t have to. However, if you decide that you only want to check emails once or twice a week (versus once or twice a day) then you probably should note that in your autoresponder.
Email newsletters also tend to clutter up the inbox. I find I need to purge mine about once a year because I get excited about a new idea or new connection, but then I never read the newsletters. If you’re getting emails from someone and you never read them, just unsubscribe.
Be kind to the sender and don’t mark it as spam if you know you signed up for it or agreed to let them have your email. Use the unsubscribe link which every single email newsletter has, usually down at the bottom.
There is another way to handle this that I heard from a networking connection (unfortunately I can’t remember off the top of my head who it was!) Instead of subscribing willy-nilly to everything, she allows just five email newsletters. That’s the amount she feels she can handle that gives her good info and doesn’t feel overwhelming.
That way you won’t have to deal with constantly purging once the number of newsletters grows too big. It also forces you to prioritize, which isn’t a bad thing. That keeps you intentional about the content you consume.
Other email etiquette to keep inboxes from being overwhelmed:
Do not reply-all. There are rare exceptions when reply-all is useful and necessary, but mostly it’s a waste of people’s time. And if you get stuck on a huge email chain that’s irrelevant to you, for the love of the Flying Spaghetti Monster do NOT reply all to ask your name be taken off the email.
You don’t have to write a paragraph when a sentence will do.
On the other hand, do try to put all the relevant info in the email. If the objective of the email is to agree on a place to eat, or to get approval on a social media post, or whatever the topic is, don’t go down a side trail and ignore the main topic.
Read the email before you respond. I used to use a LOT of “per my last email” when I was in corporate. You are wasting people’s time when you ask them to explain something they already explained but you just didn't take the time to read it. (If you didn’t understand it and need clarification, that’s a different matter.)
Simplify your business processes to improve productivity in the workplace
Speaking of priorities! Most of us business owners have lots of ideas and lots of things we want to do. But time is finite.
It’s pretty common that as you build a business, you add here and you add there and then you end up with unwieldy processes. Maybe in the beginning you as the business owner had to be involved in all the decisions, for example. Now there are people you can delegate to, yet the processes still involve you even though they don;t need to.
I really, really hate to use the analogy of a road map or GPS because I feel like it’s so overdone (and I use it in my book HUGE SIGH) but there’s a reason for it. When you want to improve something or achieve a goal you need to know two points: where you are and where you want to end up. Just like a GPS.
Maybe Simplify Your Life Week is a good time to assess your processes if you haven’t done so in the last year. Does anything stick out as particularly annoying or time-consuming without being super important? Things you know you need to upgrade? Stuff you keep thinking you'll fix when you have the time? Document them.
Now, what’s your vision for how the process should run? What would a seamless one look like? You might not be able to get there all at once, but ideally how should that work? Document that as well.
Then look at your starting (current state) and ending (ideal state) points on each process. Maybe for some, all you need to do is reroute a step through a staff member instead of you. Maybe there’s an automation that will take care of the whole thing for you.
But what if the journey from assessment to vision requires significant investment in money, time, effort, or some combination of the three? Upon reflection, maybe the change is so arduous that you don;t want to embark on the journey, or it’s not enough of a priority to spend all this energy.
If it is worth the effort, you can break down the milestones you need to get from here to there and decide how you want to tackle them. Be realistic about how much time you and your staff have. I know lots of business ops consultants who could help you be objective about what you find and help you decide what to implement.
As an example, I know a woman partner who throws a big conference every year in her market. The conference isn’t necessarily a moneymaker but helps her firm get exposure and credibility as leaders in the field. In other words, the conference is just one of her many responsibilities.
She has a professional photographer who takes a lot of shots that can be repurposed. She told me she spends hours and hours going through the photographs and picking the best ones, and matching them up with the people in them.
My first reaction was, Are you f*king kidding me? The partner at the firm is spending hours and hours on… photos of the event after the fact. That are put on the site and used for some marketing materials. Talk about something that isn’t a priority in the grand scheme of things.
I had two thoughts on how to solve this problem:
Figure out what the parameters are for “good” photos (no one shown with their yes closed or food in their open mouths or whatever), a good mix of audience characteristics, etc. Then give the parameters, a list of attendees, and the photos to an assistant, maybe even a virtual one, to pick out and add names.
I don’t know if this is a thing that can currently be done, but seems to me this is a tailor-made use case for AI. I greatly dislike generative AI specifically because the models have been trained on work by people who did not give their consent for their stuff to be used, so it’s theft. But surely you could give a list of attendees and speakers and let a different type of AI do the labeling.
This is a CLASSIC example of how you could be more productive by simplifying: delegating and prioritizing. Business owners need to spend their time on important tasks that no one else can do.
Simplify your possessions
For some of us, shopping is a recreational activity. (My own particular weakness is the bookstore, not gonna lie.) At one time I was also a clotheshorse. But most business owners don’t really need a lot of things.
There’s definitely a bare minimum that you need to get by, but being comfortable with what you’ve got is going to be different for different people depending on the stuff. If you move a lot, you know the cathartic feeling of getting rid of things you haven’t used in a long time, whether that’s clothes, coffee mugs, holiday decorations, or whatever.
It’s the same in business: do you need two different CRMs? (No.) If you currently have two tools to solve the same problem, it’s simpler to fully explore one tool and get rid of the second one.
Some people prefer to have best-of-breed (in their price point) for a variety of systems, and so they have more apps that need to be linked together. All the linking can sometimes cause issues, but it’s not necessarily wrong.
Other business owners might prefer to have an all-in-one tool that solves a variety of problems knowing that some of the functions will just be good enough – but that is good enough for them.
Possessions also include things like bank accounts, credit cards, brokerage accounts, retirement accounts, etc. If you have a financial planner that charges a fee based on assets, you’ll get much better service from having your money with one planner than if you divvy it up between different ones.
You’ll have to be more intentional about who you go with and why, and do your due diligence before you commit. The end result will be better. Same with credit cards, both personal and business. You’ll get points and rewards a lot faster if you use one card for personal and one for business instead of multiple cards for each.
Simplify daily routines for more joy
Assess your current routines. Are there any that you don’t need or want to do that have outlived their usefulness? Or maybe you’ve got some routines that need a little jazzing up to be more fun.
Do you find you don’t have time and energy at the end of the day to do anything but grab a glass of wine and recline? Or that the balance of your life is tilted heavily towards work and you don’t like it but don’t see how you can change it? (This is where I come in, BTW.)
What would your vision of an ideal day, week, month, year look like? What would you like to do less of and what do you want to do more of? What are you doing now that brings you joy, and how can you increase the amount of time you spend in a joyful state?
Recap (tl;dr)
Our world is complex, and simplifying life creates less stress. For business owners, there are ways to simplify both home and business so you have more time to do the things you want to do.
If you feel like you’re working too much and living too little, know that you’re not alone. But also that I can help you out of the morass. You’ll get clarity on how you want to spend your time (and energy) as well as strategies to make that happen. Schedule your free consult here.