5 tips for online entrepreneurs to improve productivity

Productivity is a key factor in success for online entrepreneurs. When you’re able to focus and efficiently produce more online courses or marketing content, you can drive sales and revenue. Here are some suggestions you can use to better plan your day, save time, and get more accomplished. 

Optimize your schedule

When looking to stay productive, trying a new time management tool could help you better manage your day and in turn boost overall productivity. Here are three time management frameworks you could try: 

The Pomodoro Technique

With the Pomodoro Technique, you work in focused 25 minute increments with a 5 minute break. So, if you’re working on a large project, you’ll break all of the work into tasks that you can fit into 25 minutes. Let’s say you’re building a new online course about retirement planning. Various parts of that overall project include researching, writing video scripts, filming segments, editing segments, uploading videos, building new website pages, writing marketing posts, drafting and building marketing emails. 

You’ll use Pomodoros to break those parts down even further to more manageable and actionable chunks. Instead of writing “create retirement financial planning video script” as the whole to-do list item, be more specific. Try: “write 401k plan script section”, “write annuities script section”, “write Roth IRA script section”. Those are examples of tasks you could accomplish in a dedicated 25 minute timeframe.

Can’t get a task done in one Pomodoro? Schedule two or three back-to-back, but be sure to save your work then give yourself that five minute break.  

For example, maybe you’re spending the day working on your membership site. Use Pomodoros as a project management template to make a more actionable plan. Schedule three Pomodoros for website building, two for website content, two for planning your email campaign, and one for drafting announcement social media posts. 

This can help mitigate the risk of getting overwhelmed at the prospect of producing a whole new knowledge product. The advantages to this technique include minimizing distractions, project planning, and breaking up bigger tasks into more manageable chunks.

The Eisenhower Matrix

The Eisenhower Matrix, developed by former President Dwight D. Eisenhower, is a great tool when prioritizing tasks. With it, you categorize tasks by urgency and importance:

• Tasks that are urgent and important need to be done first. 
• Tasks that are urgent but not important should be delegated to someone else. 
• Tasks that are not urgent but important should be scheduled for the future. 
• And if something is neither urgent nor important, you can delete it from the to-do list.

Kajabi Hero JoAnn Krall shares her tips for productivity, saying, “I always recommend starting with simplifying. We procrastinate for many reasons. Do a big brain dump of everything you do, need to do, and really just anything that comes to mind. Then evaluate that list. What can you let go of whether you can eliminate or delegate?”

The trick to this time management frame is to be honest about what is truly important and urgent. 

The 1-3-5 Rule

This time management framework also involves schedule planning at the beginning of a day. With the 1-3-5 rule, you make a to do list with one big task, three medium tasks, and five small tasks. For a day in the life of a knowledge entrepreneur, this might look like:

• Big task: Film a new video segment
• Medium tasks: Draft a new marketing email, research a course topic, and plan future blog posts
• Small tasks: Post on LinkedIn, post on Facebook, meet with a team member, upload a video or audio file, and reply to client emails
  

By categorizing tasks and being realistic about how much you can actually accomplish in a day, you can master your workflow.

Outsource tasks

If you’re struggling with productivity, it may be that you’re taking on more work than you have time to accomplish. This can be a sign that your business is growing! Perhaps you’re spending time doing something outside of your skillset, so it’s taking a disproportionate amount of time in your schedule.

Outsourcing a portion of your work could be the way to free up your time for course production, likely your most effective use of time. Here are suggestions for things you could outsource

• Reception. If calls interrupt your work, using a virtual receptionist service can save you time while also giving callers a better experience than asking them to leave a voicemail. 
• Marketing. Marketing is a wide field that often requires a lot of specific skills to execute a campaign, such as copywriting, graphic design, social media, or marketing strategy. Outsourcing some or all of these specific skills can help you leverage others’ expertise and could improve your marketing performance.
• Accounting. Depending on the complexity of your business, it may be time to bring on someone else to manage your financials.
• Administrative tasks. There are many virtual assistant services that can tackle things from inbox management, scheduling, research, travel booking, or data entry. 
  

Kajabi Hero Melissa Hiemann says, “I have an assistant who manages my inbox virtually. She sorts through and replies to most emails, and stars anything priority for me to look at.”

Automate

Automating work can save you tons of time on repetitive tasks. Within Kajabi, you can automate tasks within Pipelines, email campaigns, events, forms, offers, and posts. Kajabi Automations use when, then, if logic to help you streamline Kajabi processes and ultimately automate basic actions in the app. This can save you time when nurturing your prospects or existing customers. 

Some social media platforms, like Facebook, allow you to schedule posts in advance. While this isn’t very high-tech, you can still be more efficient by planning multiple posts in one session and scheduling them to post later. Or, use a social media aggregator like Hootsuite to simultaneously push out posts across your online presence. This way, you don’t have to drop what you’re doing whenever you want to share a new post. 

You can also implement remote working tools that can automate everything from meeting transcription to project management workflow tasks. 

Template

Building templates for your content can be an investment in time that pays off later. Using templates for videos, social media posts, blog posts, or podcasts will streamline your production. These could be visual templates, like a branded PDF or social media graphic, or copy-based templates for video scripts or blog posts.

With Kajabi, you can use our customizable Blueprints to speed up the process of building your sales funnels. Working within templates can save you time compared to creating everything from scratch each time you produce content.

Jump In

When selling any product, ultimately, the only way to get anything done is to get started. Kajabi Hero Carmen Morin recalls, “I remember when I realized just how much time I spent reading and doing courses on ‘being productive.’ At the end of the day, sit down and take action. Imperfect steps, brain dumping, less planning and more action to allow things to take shape.” 

Don’t get bogged down by productive procrastination. Spending time researching things like productivity or new tools can be a great jumping off point, but only if you put your learnings into place and get started. Feeling like you’re being productive is not the same thing as actually producing the content that brings in revenue.

Another helpful thing to keep in mind is not to let perfection prohibit you from finishing anything. Sure, a polished product is great to have, but there comes a point when further tweaks or changes will not make a big difference. Işil Berkün, another Kajabi Hero says, “Give yourself the permission to make mistakes and you will correct them as you go and just start. Now. You will keep going once you start.”

Ready to get started? Start your free trial of Kajabi today so you can build your product and start to see results.

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