Shorten Your Workday

That kind of performance isn’t easy to deliver during a standard workday.

"My salespeople were frustrated that they couldn’t get to everybody they want to," says Hood, who sometimes worked 80 hours a week or more.

Companies like Market Crank don’t necessarily need more hours to accomplish their desired tasks, however. Many just need to improve their productivity.

According to an online Microsoft survey, average workers in the United States feel that up to 16 hours of their workweeks are unproductive. They spend more than five hours in meetings, and 71 percent say that meetings are unproductive.

According to Rich Townsend, a productivity consultant and vice president of Townsend Consulting Group of Marco Island, part of the problem is the distraction of constant communication. E-mails, text messages and phone calls, for instance, cut into time that might otherwise be spent on productive tasks. "You get scattered rather than doing the most leveraged, most important things that need to be done," Townsend says. "It’s dramatic."

He offers several tips to boost your output without adding more hours to your workday. First, Townsend says, managers and staff should create a master list of everything that has to get done. Start with items of a more immediate nature: submitting expense reports, attending meetings, returning phone calls. Then, add the tasks required for a company to move forward: contacting potential clients, purchasing inventory or equipment, hiring staff. Finally, carry a "capture tool"—a voice recorder, a PDA, a notepad—to keep track of new tasks and ideas, and add them to your list at the end of each day.

Step two is to accept that you probably won’t ever get to everything on the list. "Businesses and employees want to live in the fantasy that they can get it all done, but they just can’t," Townsend says. "[Trying to tackle everything] is what makes people crazy, and that’s what has people not choosing the most important things to do."

Having the list is important, though, because it helps a team determine which items are most critical. These should be slotted in a calendar and given sufficient time to complete. He calls this moving from what he calls "task-centric scheduling" to "calendar-centric scheduling."

"You will be living the truth," he says. "Your productivity for things you are doing is going to be much higher."

Fort Myers-based Fox Electronics needed some help "living the truth." Employees were getting upwards of 300 to 400 e-mails a day. Managers invited too many people to meetings. Sales associates were overwhelmed by the number of follow-up calls that had to be made.

The company turned to ActionCOACH in Fort Myers to design and implement a new customer follow-up system, which includes computerized reminders. In a matter of weeks, the sales associates were reaching out to new clients and following up with existing ones to see how they were using Fox’s components.

"I would say within six months, [ActionCOACH’s system] will pay for itself—easily," says E.L. Fox, the president of Fox Electronics. "We’re finding out where the business is going, and we can chase it."

Productivity seminars can range from $300 to $600 or more per attendee, Townsend says. More customized consulting, when a team spends time surveying staff and clients, designing new systems and helping implement them, can range from $20,000 to $50,000 or more.

Sharon Hood has seen definite improvements since she and her marketing staff first hired Townsend Consulting to address their productivity issues three years ago. Together, they created several new systems, including a series of steps to help Hood’s staff track the development, implementation and growth of new projects.

Since then, she has doubled her number of employees and launched a company that publishes a monthly woman’s magazine called é Bella.

"Productivity is the end result of everything running more smoothly. We have systems now that we didn’t have before. Everyone is on the same page," Hood says. "It also makes you less tolerant of unproductive things."

Here are a few other tried-and-true productivity ideas that could benefit an individual, office or company:

• Avoid multitasking. People are often proud of their ability to work on multiple tasks at the same time, but experts say it interferes with the quality of the work, and productivity suffers.

• Schedule the most important task first, so if something unexpected arises, the more critical work is still done.

• Avoid reading every e-mail. Only read e-mails critical to your daily work. Delete spam immediately, and create a separate folder where you can save personal notes, jokes from your cousin and so forth for later reading.

• Avoid impromptu meetings. If someone walks into your office to chat, politely explain that you are in the middle of something important. Same goes for phone calls. Let them go to voicemail, and return calls later.

Sources: iVillage.co.uk; LifeOptimizer.org