What real productivity is all about

Who does not talk about being more productive, getting more done, doing less with less time and resources? Everyone talks about it, but how do you actually achieve it??

Should we only answer emails three times a day? Should we make lists in alphabetical order? Should we not take meetings at certain times of the day? Do we turn off notifications? Do we multitask or do we not??

If you want to have real productivity on your team, you need to stop focusing on all of those things and start focusing on systems instead. Because real productivity is all about your systems and has very little to do with your own individual tactics.?

Here are the characteristics of a system:?

• Interrelated elements: Systems are made up of elements that interact with each other.
• Rules: Systems follow a set of rules to form a unified whole.
• Goals: Systems are organized to accomplish an overall goal.
• Inputs and outputs: Systems have inputs that go through processes to produce outputs.

Stick with me here. Think of the last time you tried to be more productive at work and accomplish more tasks in a shorter period of time. Did you try to simply work faster, but the same way you always have, or did you come up with a strategy of how to get more work done faster??

If you continue simply throwing more people at tasks and projects, thinking more manpower is going to make a difference, you are wrong. When it comes to getting things done faster we need to look at the overarching system of how we are getting those things done to see if there is a better and more efficient way of doing them.?

In order to be more productive we need to systematize and optimize. We need to find repeatable ways of doing things. We need to reduce the amount of times tasks are switching hands or the number of times we are manually entering information into different systems. We need to reduce the amount of times we need to ask someone else a question because we don’t have all the information. We need to figure out a better way of accomplishing our work instead of doing it the same way we have always done it, and hoping that working faster is the answer.?

Good systems are repeatable, they are efficient, they require less resources, less time, less oversight and lead to less interruption and more humming along in your organization.?

We can create systems for how we gather the information we need.?

We can create systems for how we onboard a new client.?

We can create a system for how we process our vendor bills every month.?

We can create a system for how we provide customer service.?

Because while we could just get faster, creating better systems is the only sustainable, long-term solution.?

Instead of asking your team to be more productive and do more faster, ask them to spend time considering the systems they could put into place so they end up being more productive as a whole organization in the short-term and the long-term.