Productivity Tips for Website Owners

Some people work 18 hours a day and still end up accomplishing little. They’re the ones who always appear flustered, hurried, and fatigued. No one can fault them for taking it easy, but at the end of the day, there’s still a lot left on their plates.

What they lack isn’t dedication but the effective utilization of proven productivity tips. In this guide, we’ve put together 12 productivity tips for website owners that could change your professional and personal lives.

Why is Productivity Important

The ones who systematically use those productive tactics, well, they’re different. They manage to go about their days taking care of things one after the other. They have a clear sense of purpose about what they’re doing and what they’ve got to do. They don’t appear to be victims of their schedules but in command of them.

Importantly, they’re hardly tired, agitated, or anxious.

You might think that they don’t have enough work to do or that what they do have are simple tasks. You might believe that they have access to a bigger team or better software. The truth is none of that.

They’re more productive. They know how to get the most out of every single day.

For that, they consciously and regularly implement productivity tips. If you’re an online business owner who feels that you’re never getting things done, you too need a reorganization of the way you work.

12 productivity tips for website owners

1. Eliminate notifications

If you want to be productive, you’ve got to put all your concentration on the task at hand. One of the biggest obstacles to that is the constant push of notifications from your apps.

You could be in the middle of writing a presentation or reviewing a sales pitch and you suddenly get a notification from one of your social media channels or your email client. That’s enough to distract you from whatever you’re doing.

Even if you don’t click on the notification, you’ve lost your focus by merely looking at it. Now your brain has to multi-task between two attention zones. That takes away energy from the task you were focusing on.

The solution is to disable all notifications, from both your smartphone and computer. This small tip can go a long way in making you more focused and less distracted.

2. Know your priorities

You’re not there to do everything as an online business owner and be on top of all decisions and processes. Your job is to take care of the priorities. But that could lead to a bigger problem. What exactly is a priority task?

Most people see whatever’s currently on their agenda as a priority. They believe it needs all their attention just because it’s on their schedule. This is an inherently useless approach.

An effective way to prioritize is by using the Eisenhower Matrix. On the x-axis, you’ll have urgent and not urgent. On the y-axis, add important and not important.

Now, your priority number one is what’s important and urgent. You should make a plan for what’s important but not urgent. Then, delegate the urgent but not important to your teammates and eliminate the not urgent and not important tasks.

3. Focus on three priority tasks per day

Once you identify the most important and urgent tasks, it could be tempting to club all of them together and start straight away. That’d be the wrong way to handle those crucial tasks.

You should plan your priority tasks for the next day at the end of each day. You can also do it the next day, but it’ll get you energized if you step into the office knowing precisely what you’ve got to do.

Limiting those to just two or three a day is important. Even if you believe you can handle more, put all your focus on these three.

4. Divide tasks into smaller units

When tasks seem bigger, it’s easy to procrastinate. You might think you’d need an entire day to care for them. But you know very well that it’s difficult to devote a whole afternoon, much less a day, to any particular task.

The way to handle it is to divide them into smaller, manageable units. So, you don’t have to review your B2B lead generation strategy in one go. You can analyze your cold-calling methods separately from your email outreach.

You don’t have to devise an entire content strategy this week. You only have to figure out your blogs on Monday, email content on Tuesday, etc.

There’s an overlooked advantage to dividing your tasks into smaller units. Now there’s a greater scrutiny on each aspect of that job. That’ll tell you where you’ve to improve. Maybe all you’ve got to do is change your cold-calling scripts to get more leads.

5. No unnecessary meetings

If there’s one thing you can start implementing right now to improve the efficiency of your office, it’s to question the need for meetings.

Most meetings are held not because something strategically important has to be discussed. It’s because no one questioned why they had to attend a meeting.

In other words, meetings happen because meetings get scheduled.

The easiest way to analyze whether you need to meet is to ask the concerned individuals a simple question: Can this be an email or a phone call or a private chat between two people?

In a vast majority of the cases, the answer would be any of those options. Resist the urge to hold meetings if they’re pointless. Meetings are how you waste time, resources, and focus.

6. Reduce pointless communication

If meetings are obvious in how they waste time, email is a not-so-obvious drain on the company resources. If you could take a day to assess all the emails that you send, receive, and respond to, you’ll see the point.

Most of them are trivial or repetitive. People send emails not to communicate anything important but to convey to everyone else that they’re doing their part or that it’s someone else’s turn now.

Even worse is the habit of group emails. People who’ve nothing to do with a project are repeatedly notified about its progress or lack thereof. What could’ve easily been two-minute conversations between two people extend to multi-thread messages that waste everyone’s time.

If you’re an online business, tell everyone in the system that emails should be sent only if they’re urgent and only to those who need to know. Importantly, convey that any communication that can be done over the phone shouldn’t be dragged to emails.

And of course, ban or severely limit group mails.

7. Cut down on the decisions you’ve to take

There are several small decisions that you’ve to take every day that are exhausting. These include what to wear, what to eat, what route to take to the office, etc.

These trivial decisions leave you tired with little energy for the big decisions. The cure for that is to eliminate the need for such decisions. If it’s about what to wear, put your outfits on rotation.

Don’t spend more than three seconds wondering what to eat. Either decide in advance and set a routine or pick whatever comes to your mind first.

Remember, fewer decisions = more energy.

8. Automate tasks

Most people who work hard but achieve little are usually doing the same tasks repeatedly. To focus on important tasks, you need to automate everything else.

If a client sends an email about a delay in deployment or a vendor approaches you with a proposal, there should be a protocol for it. Advise your team members on what to do. You could make a memo or a to-do list for such situations.

The aim is to automate the response and make sure that you don’t have to be involved.

Other ways in which you can automate tasks? Creating draft replies to common questions, learning keyboard shortcuts, etc.

9. Never multitask

Multitasking can be defined as failing at several tasks at once. It’s the opposite of being productive.

Our attention span is limited and the last thing we should do is to give it competing sources. When you multitask, you’re ensuring that you won’t be focusing on any of the tasks properly.

Unfortunately, most people see multitasking as a virtue. They proudly talk about their ability to do several things at once and even encourage their employees to do the same. This is a recipe for a culture of mediocrity.

Don’t check your email while working. Don’t take phone calls while reading reports. Don’t text colleagues when you’re in a meeting.

Focus only on one task at a time. See only what’s in front of you.

One of the easiest ways to do it is when you’re working on a computer. Go full screen. That’ll ensure that you only see the tab in front of you. Changing tabs will require a bit more effort, and you’ll be discouraged from switching frequently.

10. Start saying no

If you’re an online business owner, you’d feel that you’ve to take care of everything. You’ve got to be on top of all decisions and processes. That means saying yes to several things.

That’s how you get constantly interrupted and get involved in tasks that don’t require your supervision. One of the most effective ways to regain your time and focus is by saying no.

You’re not being impolite or uninterested in those tasks. You’re beginning to value your time.

An easy way to do this is by delaying the time you’d take to respond. Tell them you’ll get back if someone asks to meet instead of saying yes. Then, evaluate whether it’s necessary and say no if it doesn’t seem important or urgent.

Another advantage to saying no is that you’re empowering others in the system to make decisions. That’ll speed up decision-making and increase employee engagement.

11. Know your energy rhythm

A common productivity tip for entrepreneurs and website owners is to wake up early and get to work. While it may suit some people, it won’t apply to everyone because people have varying rhythms.

The trick is to figure out your peak energy period. For some, it could be early morning, whereas others might excel in the evenings. You don’t have to follow anyone else. You just have to figure out when you’re at your best.

Once you know that, you should mark it as your “deep work time.” That’s when you should focus on the most important tasks that’ll affect your business in the long term.

You should work like a hermit during that period. You don’t need several hours to engage in deep work as it could get exhausting. You only need to devote 90 minutes to it every working day.

12. Take frequent breaks

90-hour weeks without breaks isn’t how you become productive. That’s how you become constantly fatigued, develop serious health issues, become cynical, and jaded. That’s also the recipe for relationship problems.

Taking regular breaks should be a priority for both professional and personal reasons. Unless you can step back and recharge yourself, you won’t be working at your full capacity. You’ll also be making a lot of poor decisions.

Even if you know the importance of frequent breaks, you’ve got to institutionalize that into your work culture for it to be effective. There should be dedicated slots for relaxation. These are not breaks to get into phone calls or check social media.

This is when you need to let down and breathe deeply. This is when you should go for walks, away from whatever’s on your desk.

Wrapping Up

Working hard means there’s substantial input with no significant output. Being productive means, you’re getting the most out of every day on things that matter the most.

It’s a culture where being effective is more important than being busy. As an online business owner, you should instill that culture into your professional life as well as into your organization.