Boosting productivity is a target for all of us.
The strange thing about this target is it isn’t one with an easily discernible end point.
It isn’t like a New Year’s resolution where you tell yourself you will reach your target weight, run a marathon, or finally write that book (one day…).
Improving your productivity is a continual struggle and represents an ongoing journey rather than a simple A to B. It is more about constructing habits and working methods which you can transplant into different situations. Even if the task you are working on changes, your improved work practices will carry your heightened personal efficiency into the next task.
The key method we’ll focus on in this article is the use of processes to streamline and optimize your approach to work.
How to construct a process from scratch
Lots of people avoid creating processes for their personal work or their business because they claim they don’t have time to do so.
It’s pretty much the number one reason why people don’t have effective processes in play.
However, managers consistently recognize that having strong processes to guide their teams’ operations is a crucial part of having a fully functional business.
So we have a bit of a disconnect here.
Building processes from scratch is not as difficult as it sounds. You can start off slowly and work your way up. No one expects you to decide to implement processes one day and suddenly have a full standard operating procedures manual ready the next. That’s just not realistic. But no one is saying it is.
The first step is to build one process.
My team and I work on the basis that a process needs to be built for every task you do more than twice. The point is: build your process for a repeatable task.
We also know that processes are great for quality control, double checks, and fine tuning details. So consider picking a process to build first on the basis of a task you do which encompasses these elements. I’ll be running a pre-publish process on this article when I finish in order to check over it, format, and make sure it is ready for publication. It’s the last step before my writing hits the reader, so it is a high value moment.
Think about what tasks you do in your day-to-day or week-to-week and pick one which is high value and repeatable. Build this process out first as your test process.
We’ll hit three stages of the building process:
- Define your scope
- Map your process
- Fine tune your design
Define your scope
You need to know what you are including in your process and what you are not including. I know, this sounds very simple. Yet, defining the scope of your process will allow you to better segment your work and can make processes more applicable to teams. It’s actually an important step.
In our pre-publish process, we don’t provide any steps for the creative aspect of writing an article, nor researching an article. These are activities which benefit from the freedom of being handed a long leash.
Our process roughly begins at the point when the second draft is completed. From there, we begin our process with the steps that are consistent across every post:
- Record headline
- Write 5 alternative headlines
- Make sure you have used subheadings
- …..
Etc, etc.
Map your process
Think through the process which you’re documenting. What are the different steps involved from start to finish? Is there a specific order these have to be completed in?
A good technique for this is to start off with paper and pen. You can begin the mapping process however you like. I’m a big fan of bullet points – using a piece of kit like Workflowy, for instance. Others are enamored with process diagrams or flowcharts.
But don’t you worry about what others are getting up to. You do you.
No one is asking you to use industry standard BPMN to visualize your process. This one’s for you, so map it out in the way you feel comfortable with. You can break the process into chunks and then break those chunks into smaller steps. You can then break those steps into even smaller tasks.
When you’ve fragmented your process into its smallest constituent parts – like a modern day Democritus – you can then piece it together again into a linear structure and (tada!) you have a documented process!
Fine tune your design
As with software development, the best way to improve a process and see its strengths and flaws is to put it live.
There will be moments where you realize you’ve left out an important step of the process and need to add it in. These quick realizations are only the start of your optimization journey.
A process should speed up the way you work and it should provide for consistent quality every time. So, you need to find ways to measure these variables. How you do this will depend on the industry you’re in and what you’ve constructed your process for.
For my pre-publish process, I can time how long it takes me to go through the process. I can also review the article a few days later and see how many terrible typos (or British English spellings) I can find. I can assign certain variables to assess how effective the process is proving to be.
As you follow the process over time, as long as you’re using an interactive tool like Process Street, you’ll easily be able to see how long a process has taken you. If you feel like this time is too long, you can return to the design of the process and begin to question where and how it can be sped up.
Automate your processes to maximize your productivity
Maybe you’re including tasks which serve little value but add a lot of time? Or, maybe you’re completing labor intensive tasks which could be automated?
Because here’s the kicker: Once you have your process documented and actionable on a platform like Process Street, you can begin to add third party automations to streamline your own workload.
If you think a process is going to boost your productivity, wait until you see what an automated process can do to maximize your output.
The first step is to build that first process.
From there, you will see how easy it is to do, and you will recognize that the efficiency savings very quickly pay off the initial time costs of creating your process.
Once you have one process you will soon have many.
Build them today to get a hold of your workload and maximize your productivity!