Double Your Productivity in 3 Easy Steps

I always remember a cartoon showing two groups battling one another with spears. Behind one of the leaders, a sales person is trying to sell them a machine gun. The guy is clearly irritated and barks out “Get lost, can’t you see I’m fighting a war?”

That image has stuck with me. And there’s another. This is of Formula 1 cars coming in for a pit stop just to change tyres, then winning the race having gained a few seconds a lap. The improvement more than made up for the pit stop time over the remainder of the race.

Both of these illustrate the business point that in our hectic lives, it often pays to stop and invest in things that improve longer term results. In the last few centuries agricultural productivity has increased around a hundredfold, and it’s all from brain power. If we neglect investment in the future, our business won’t be there when the time comes.

Of course, talking about this is much easier than practising it. You may not agree with my particular recommendations, but the principle of taking action remains – just substitute your own favourites. Here are my three tips:

·    Always look for productivity savings. It could be a franking machine, it could be using text messages rather than emails, it could be a new back office system, it could be a new technique. Never stop looking.

·    Learn from others. Maybe through courses, maybe online forums, maybe local business networking events, maybe doing an MBA. I personally find that going to conferences and seminars invariably piques my interest and gives me new ideas.

·    Always be testing a new approach. It’s easy to argue with colleagues, or even yourself, about what new initiative might or might not work. But nothing proves it like experience, so you should always be trying out new things, and dropping them if they don’t work.

Can we double our productivity this way? Maybe, but you can definitely improve performance. It’s all part of what makes business exciting, so never give up.