As the leading provider of field service software for green industry professionals, we are in the business of optimizing other people’s businesses (dang, that was a good opening!). We provide software for irrigation, lawn maintenance and many other businesses to help streamline their operations and ultimately earn them more money and save them time.
Over the years that we’ve been blogging, we've written about how to optimize your business before. Here are a few of the articles we’ve written on productivity:
3 Sales Productivity Tips for Your Green Industry Business
Optimize Your Irrigation Business With These Five Tips
5 Things To Do When You Don't Have Time
But we’ve never really covered some ways that the field service PROFESSIONAL can optimize the way they operate. We've never really looked at what individuals can do to be more productive. Here are 6 ways you can get the most out of your workdays.
Tee up your day
One of the best ways to optimize your personal schedule is to plan out your day the night before. Much like your business, you should have a plan of what you would like to accomplish and how you would like to accomplish it.
Every night, you should make a to-do list for the following morning. Put together your most important tasks and front-load them for the morning. Why early on? Read the next point!
Get the important stuff done early
Studies have proven that your most productive time of day is between 6am and 9am. So if you don’t think you’re a morning person, maybe this research will help convince you to get out of bed a little earlier every day. Science tells us we’re our most productive selves early in the morning.
Make your commute productive
If you have some calls that you can make that don’t require you to take notes, go ahead and use your commute time to catch up on the calls you need to make. Only do this, of course, if you have a hands-free option available. Call customers back to answer questions on the way to jobs or touch base with your office staff.
You can also make your drive time more productive by listening to audiobooks or podcasts while you’re heading out to a job. Here are a few of my recommendations:
‘Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us' by Daniel H. Pink
'Getting to Yes: How To Negotiate Agreement Without Giving In' by Roger Fisher and William Ury
John Lee Dumas' Entrepreneur on Fire
Turn menial tasks into a routine
One of the best ways to optimize your day is by getting certain tasks to become second nature to you. This can be tasks like answering customer emails or buttoning up some paperwork. Anything that you have to do daily that you don't really enjoy doing, try to make these things a habit.
A great way to do this is by picking the same time everyday and setting a timer for yourself. It sounds goofy, but there is a whole group of people who live their life by 25 minute increments counted down by a kitchen timer. They call it the Pomodoro Technique, named after the famous tomato shaped kitchen timer! Here is a website that explains this technique: http://www.chriswinfield.com/40-pomodoro-workweek/ .
I’m giving it a go today to see how it works, I'll try and give an update on how it is going! Let me know if you try it out, too!
Take regular breaks
This is more important to productivity than most know. Field service jobs are typically physical in nature and you can wear yourself out if you don’t take regular breaks. Notice how in the article above, a break is built into their plan.
Don’t wear yourself out physically or mentally. Take regular breaks, even if they are just five minutes every hour or so. This also goes for longer periods of time. If you've had a long season and are feeling drained, give yourself some time off to recharge your batteries!
Create personal benchmarks
There is only so much that you can get done in a day. Set personal benchmarks for yourself to really up your productivity. Kind of like the Pomodoro Technique, you should break your day up into smaller chunks of achievable benchmarks and your weeks up into the larger goals you want to accomplish. Maybe it is startup season for your irrigation business. Make a weekly goal of getting half of your customers’ systems back up and running, but break the days of the week up into smaller benchmarks.
Now that you're optimizing your days, why not optimize your web presence? Download our free eBook, Local SEO for Green Industry Businesses, by clicking below!
