Focus. Systemize. Delegate.

Your productivity, your effectiveness, your ability to get more of the right things done and maintain your sanity while doing so all start with your mind set. That is – a productive mindset.

A mindset is a set of attitudes and beliefs and expectations you have about any given situation. I describe mind set as equaling results plus systems plus delegation.

Focus on results, systemize everything you can and delegate everything you absolutely don’t have to do yourself.

So let’s look at each of those.

Focus on results:
This is a simple change in your state of mind that can make you more productive and happier in your work. It’s a shift of your mind set from the work to getting the result, where it can feel like drudgery if you see it as onerous and overwhelming, but if you take your focus off of the work and place it on the result, that is, keep the result in your mind, not the work, it shifts you from a mental place of working to a mental place of accomplishment, fulfillment and satisfaction of a job well done.

Ask any successful entrepreneur about the work they do and the majority of them will immediately shift the conversation away from the work towards the dream, towards the impact that they want to have in the world; towards the result they’re trying to realize. It’s not that they don’t work or don’t understand work, it’s that work is simply the path to the result they want. Their minds are focused on the result.

Most of them will tell you about the unbelievable hours they work and they’ll do it with a smile, not because they love work, they want to get free of work at some point, but because they get joy from making progress towards the result.

Systemize everything you can:
There are two kinds of tasks, one time tasks and repetitive tasks. So repetitive tasks are those which occur often, with frequency, basically the same or similar task is done over and over. The vast majority of business work consists of repetitive tasks from strategic planning which is done annually or less to filing which is done dozens of times a day. You wouldn’t create an entirely new invoice every time you need to bill a customer, you’d use a standardized template or an invoice form, which is a kind of system. It’s the repetitive nature of business work that makes systematization both possible and beneficial.

If you find yourself doing the same thing, the same task repeatedly or making the same decision day after day, it’s time to create a system to deal with that task. So, for instance, if you’re asked to approve lots of purchases every week, rather than view each purchase as a unique event, you can create a set of decision rules for routine decisions and let other qualified people make the decisions following the rules, standards, procedures that you’ve established. So instead of hundreds of such tasks yearly, you’ve one task and that’s the creation of the system and only a few occasional purchasing decisions that are exceptions to the rules that you’ve set out. You should create systems to deal with repetitive work and then when a particular task comes to your attention or when you schedule it, you simply plug it into your system.

When a task has been systemized it’s easier to delegate it and it can be completed with a minimum of supervision. So one-time or infrequent tasks, unless they’re really important, don’t require a system, you can just simply deal with them as they occur by doing them yourself or delegating them.

Which brings us to the third point; delegate everything you don’t absolutely or you absolutely don’t have to do yourself.

If you’re like most small business owners, you’re a go getter and your basic mindset is simply to wade in and get the job done. The more productive mindset is to delegate all you can and only do yourself what you can’t delegate. That alone can boost your personal productivity immensely. Your first instinct should be to create a system for getting it done and delegate it to someone else to do. The idea is for you to take on only those tasks that you can’t delegate and to systemize all work that can be systemized, which is almost all work.

Until next time…

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