What If It Could Be Simpler?
Is your life simple and easy, as a business owner?
Or is your life and/or business so complicated that you laughed as you read that question?
I may not be the queen of making things more complicated than they need to be, but when I was younger I was at least a first-tier princess in complication. As I’ve grown older, I‘ve both wanted to make things simpler and learned how to do that when I can.
July 12th is National Simplicity Day, and there are some simple but not necessarily easy ways to get $hit done so you can have a life you love in addition to the business you love.
Improving your productivity is simple, but not always easy
When I was a financial planner, I would often say that the tenets are simple, not easy. Spend less than you earn, save the difference, and invest most of it for the long term (but leave yourself some emergency money.) Stay invested in a diversified portfolio, and gradually move some money to lower risk assets when you’re closer to needing them.
That’s pretty simple. This isn’t rocket surgery. :-) But it’s not necessarily easy to do. You can make things easier by doing things like automatically contributing to your retirement account each pay period and having the money automatically invested. To stay invested, ignore your portfolio except maybe once or twice a year to rebalance back to your original allocation.
In both cases, you’re making the environment easier to do the simple (and smart) thing. This means you don’t have to rely on willpower, which is not only limited but tends to dry up very fast when there’s an issue.
When I was first in the finance world, I worked as an analyst for what was then SwissBank Warburg Dillon Read, which shortly thereafter merged with Union Bank of Switzerland to form UBS. My boss was a tax and estate lawyer and I loved learning about all the different trusts.
CRUTS and CRATs and GRATs, oh my! All kinds of things where you can give some money to a charity or trust but reserve most of it for yourself, creating a lower tax liability. All those complicated yet intriguing concepts kept me learning about them.
How many have I set up or recommended setting up? Zero. They were complicated, which made them interesting, but ultimately they were not particularly useful. When you introduce complexity in many fields, you also increase the costs. In certain situations, the complicated financial instruments did make sense, but those situations were few and far between.
I spent more time telling people to diversify out of their tech stocks (during the dot com boom) and not to cash out of everything because they were freaked at how much they’d lost on paper (the dot com crash.) Not as complex or interesting, but the foundations of personal finance were infinitely more useful to the vast majority of clients I worked with over the years.
Similarly, it is really simple to be more productive.
Get off your phone
Disable all your notifications (ALL your notifications, and yes ALL does include email)
Batch like tasks together
Set aside time for focus work ON your business and honor it
There are a few other simple things, like actually leaving work to do fun things and taking breaks (that don’t involve screens at all) after you’ve done hard work, either mentally or physically.
But easy? I once gave a presentation about productivity at my local chamber of commerce. I spoke for about ½ an hour, and I made everyone put away their phones. Several people told me later they were sweating it.
Half an hour, out of twenty-four hours in a day. Just 30 minutes away from their phones wasn’t easy. And some of them were my age, meaning they had grown up and spent all their formative years sans smartphone. And still, it’s hard.
It’s tempting to make productivity complicated – just remember, complexity increases costs. You can get the latest project management software, find the latest off-brand Zapier to knit your systems together, keep looking for the magical software that will somehow make you more productive. Subscribe to the hype around predictive text at scale (generative AI/LLMs.) And discover you’re not any more productive than you were before you spent the money and/or time.
Being an overcomplicator myself, I get it. However, just as a CRUT isn’t going to help you when you have no money to invest because you spent it all, software isn’t going to help you be more productive when you don’t give yourself the ability to focus.
Simple doesn’t always mean easy.
An easy way to start simplifying for increased productivity
Wait, JJ! Didn’t you just say that simple doesn’t always mean easy? And yes, I did. Sometimes, when you know you need to simplify but you’re not sure where to begin, the best place to start is something easy.
A quick win.
Like when you’re paying off credit card debt. There are basically two ways to do it when you have multiple cards you need to pay down: start with the smallest balance or start with the highest interest rate.
Assuming one card has the highest rate and another the smallest balance, the quickest way to do it is to pay off the higher interest rate one first. Balances still generate interest charges while you’re paying them off, so you’ll have less debt accruing during the process if you get rid of the high interest first.
However, this is the wrong place to start for a lot of people. Why? Because it takes longer to pay off the higher interest rate one, and a lot of people get discouraged before the whole plan is executed. The best plan is the one you’ll follow. Paying off the smallest balance first gives you a quicker win and the ability to stay the course.
So, what’s a quick win for productivity? Honestly, disabling all notifications is probably the fastest way to go. It gives you more bang for the buck, just like paying off the high interest card first.
But that might be the wrong place for you to start. Instead, try batching like tasks together for an easier, quicker win to get started on improving your effectiveness.
When you batch like tasks together as much as you can, you’ll probably notice you have more energy towards the end of the day: a win, with not much downside or expected downside.
Why is batching so helpful? Every time you switch tasks, it’s taxing for your brain. Even if you’re not trying to multitask, just dropping one task for a different one takes some additional energy.
So if your afternoon looks like: email, email, phone call, invoice, email, projections, email, phone call, marketing plans, email, then you have eight leakages. One for each time you switched tasks.
But instead if your afternoon was email, email, email, email, email, phone call, phone call, invoice, projections, marketing plans you’ve only got four chances. Same work, just handled differently, saves you some energy.
And for most people, switching that batching to invoice, projections, marketing plans first and then email, email, email, email, email, phone call, phone call will feel less tiring. Because you’ll have tackled some issues first and solved a problem or two.
But maybe batching everything in your day is a little much. You’ll need to have an autoresponder on your email that lets the sender know you’ve received it, and you’ll need to inform a wide variety of stakeholders about the new policy. Probably more than once.
For a smaller but maybe quicker win, try batching admin tasks and/or content creation first. Instead of generating invoices one by one, for example, do them all at once a few times a month or quarter. (These can also be automated for a lot of businesses.)
Or/and if you prefer, take a day or an afternoon to create content in whatever form you like. You can match this up with your marketing calendar or you might have a content calendar. Posts can be scheduled ahead of time, so you don’t have to be on the platform to post the content you created months or weeks ago.
These are pretty easy ways to start simplifying without having to really change a lot. And you might be surprised at how much better you feel at the end of the day.
More simplification for your business and effectiveness
Another thing that often needs simplifying are the processes in the business. Even storing information can get really complicated really fast. I use folders, but if you have to go through seven or eight folders to get what you need, it’s almost as bad as not having a system at all.
If you’ve got a process or system that kee[ps breaking, it’s highly likely it’s either overcomplicated or you’re missing a key step. If that process already has a lot of steps, adding another one is probably not going to help – that one probably needs simplification.
Process mapping can be extremely helpful, and I love doing this (so feel free to set up your free consultation call). Drawing out what happens and who’s involved can often show you what’s going wrong. Getting everyone involved in the process or its results can help you build a streamlined, effective process that is as simple as possible while still providing the outcomes you want.
Remember that when you’re stressed out your fight-flight-or-freeze system takes control, and the thinky, problem-solving part of your brain goes AWOL for a little while. That means your decisions may work in the short-term, but almost by definition won’t work in the long term. You’re setting yourself up for failure if you’re making decisions while completely stressed out.
That means sometimes the simplest and most effective thing you can do is take a couple of deep breaths. You’re telling yourself that you’re not, in fact, about to get eaten by a wild animal, so your brain will allow the “thinky” system to come back on line.
This one is so easy that I often forget to do it! But when I do remember, it really does work. It won’t work if you’re staying at your phone or your email or your social media though. Close your eyes or look out the window, preferably at something in nature like a tree or a pond or garden.
And what can you simplify at home to make your life easier? You can corral your kids and spouse to do housework and cooking and all the rest of it. Once your kids are a certain age and need less supervision or are out of the house entirely, your routines can change. Just because you’ve always done something in a more complicated way doesn’t mean you have to continue doing it.
Recap (tl;dr):
Simplification isn’t always easy, but can help you get more accomplished at home and at work. Pick something easy to start if you’re not sure what to do.
I am really good at simplifying while still getting results. Click here to set up your free consult.