As consultants, our objective is to optimize an area of the company-client thanks to our experience and knowledge. However, these two requirements will not be enough for our work to be successful. It is essential that you learn to improve your productivity, otherwise, you may find yourself with two scenarios: the first will be a happy client with the results achieved but not with the invoice for hours of dedication, that is, a dissatisfied client; or the second, that it will be charging less than the time you have really spent to keep the client fully satisfied with your work.
However, there may be another scenario, the optimal scenario, in which, thanks to your level of productivity, you can satisfactorily charge each hour invested, and the client is fully satisfied with your work. Are you willing to get it? If your answer has been affirmative… keep reading and we will help you with these 10 ways to improve your productivity as a consultant that we propose.
“Your work is going to fill a good part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied with yourself is to do what you think is fantastic work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. And if you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Do not give up. When you find it, you will realize, from the bottom of your heart, that you have found it.” – Steve Jobs
make focus
You will not be more productive by starting to work right now, first of all, you will have to know how to distinguish which are the most important elements, and which you can ignore or postpone. Consultants tend to build a key method for our work, and we love to analyze everything in detail to find the key problems and optimal solutions. However, we need to learn to define our investigations and analysis, because if we let ourselves go… they will never end!
Therefore, the fundamental thing when starting any project is to create a map of elements and emphasize those that are key. From there, start from the most important to the least important, and do not move on to the next until we have finished the previous one.
Focusing basically consists of concentrating on something specific, abstracting yourself from everything else. In this way, you focus all your energy on a single thing and you can do it faster and more efficiently than if you did several at the same time.
“All things will be produced in superior quantity and quality, and with greater ease, when each man labors in one occupation, according to his natural gifts, and at the proper time, without interfering with anything else.” – Plato
Set real deadlines, and meet them!
They say that man is the only animal that stumbles twice over the same stone, and in a matter of overestimating our ability to work, it happens often. In order to improve your productivity properly, it is important that you set yourself realistic goals and deadlines. Otherwise you will lose focus and end up not fulfilling them, with the consequent loss of your self-esteem in terms of achieving goals.
The life of a consultant, especially when you are self-employed and an entrepreneur, can be very chaotic if you don’t learn to tell a client “no”, or even better, “right now I don’t have time to offer you a quality service”. Although there are those who say yes to practically any project for fear of losing a client, the truth is that the “no” usually bring many “yes” thanks to the trust and sincerity shown.
establish a routine
Although each project is different, and from time to time you will have to modify it, it is important to establish some key routines to organize the work and improve your productivity. In this sense, you will have to identify which are your most productive moments of the day, and which are those where you need to carry out somewhat more routine activities that do not require a great mental effort. I invite you to create a small schedule, like the ones we used when we went to school where you indicate:
- Periods of 40 min – 1 hour of productive work that requires our maximum dedication and concentration
- Periods of 15 minutes in between to take breaks or perform more routine tasks such as reading email
I propose an example:
- – Review of email, organization of the tasks of the day and review of our Feedly with our favorite sources of information
- – Task 1 (something we want to start the day with and we know we will be able to do quickly and it will motivate us)
- – Task 2 (the most complex and long task of the day)
- – Coffee reading our favorite Twitter lists and checking email
- – Task 2 (second part)
- – Task 2 (third part)
- – Break to eat, play sports…
- – Email review
- – Task 3
- – Task 4
- – Cafe reviewing LinkedIn
- – Task 5
- – Email review, assessment of daily work and setting pending tasks for the next day
measure your progress
Experience is a degree and will help improve your productivity on its own, as long as you start with a clear foundation. Therefore, it is not bad to stop to self-evaluate yourself from time to time. There are applications like MyHours that can help you track the time you spend on each type of task and see how you progress over the months and years, in terms of not requiring as much effort and dedication.
The first time you do something it can take you valuable time, but the second time you do it faster, and so on. However, there is always a limit, so do not try to cut time where you cannot, remember that it is necessary to maintain quality.
Visualize and motivate yourself
Give yourself small “awards” to motivate yourself, and you will see your productivity improve. When we visualize the result of our efforts, we find the dedication of time it requires much more rewarding.
There are those who find the money in itself already encouraging and make the direct relationship between: if I manage to finish this work in the established time, the project will be very profitable. Others are motivated by the mere fact of working with large companies that will give them a reputation in the consulting sector. But other people need to visualize more concrete elements. For example: If I achieve my sales goal this quarter, I will go to that restaurant with a Michelin Star that is so expensive and that I really want to try.
Think about it, what is that whim that you would like to grant yourself when you achieve your next goal?
Use resources and templates
At Academia de Consultores we have a complete library of resources specially designed so that our students can be more productive (calendars, task planners, step-by-step tutorials, guides, briefing templates, etc.). What’s more, we also have some free ones for our readers that you can download here: Free Marketing Resources
These types of resources and templates will help you improve your productivity since they will be guides or bases that you will create once, for a client, and then you can recycle them, adapting them to each specific project.
Get organized!
Having a messy desk will reduce your concentration. And having your files without a good classification when saving them will make you waste a lot of time looking for them.
Picking up your office is not wasting time, it is organizing to be able to focus. And even if you think that it is too much work and effort to organize all the work of your life at this point, the truth is that it is never too late, and I am sure that you will take advantage of it sooner rather than later to improve your productivity.
“Intelligence is thus nothing more than a generic term that designates the higher forms of organization or balance of cognitive structures” – Jean Piaget
Don’t procrastinate
There are always easier tasks, which you preferred or motivating, and others that are more difficult for us to carry out. I would be very clear. Those tasks that we like, do not contribute to us, have to be delegated. There are always professionals willing to collaborate with us and contribute what they do best. Of course, we will have to be willing to give them that part of the business and pay them properly.
A clear example is the paperwork that every independent consultant has to do with regard to the administration of his country (account books, VAT payment, etc.). If they are a puzzle for you… why not hire someone to take care of them so you can focus on your real work?
And in the event that there is no possibility of delegating this task, we will have to find the best moment of the day, in which we feel with more strength and motivation, to carry it out, without postponing it in the days. If we do it, it will probably take too long or we will even make a big ball of tasks that we do not like and it will be much more difficult for us to undo.
“The way to start is to stop talking and start doing” – Walt Disney
We hope that these ideas to improve your productivity as a consultant will be of great help to you. Feel free to share your own tricks to be more productive in the comments. We’d love to learn from you!