Productivity, organization, and efficiency as a small business owner are as essential as having a consistent cash flow. Some might even say you can’t have one without the other, which is why I want to share these productivity tips for my fellow online small business owners.

Maybe it’s the Virgo in me or maybe it’s the millennial FOMO ingrained into my psyche pushing me to dip my toes into every new app that promises some sort of workflow simplification. (Where are my fellow millennials who feel me on this??) I’m not sure the reason behind why I do what I do, but I tend to switch task management platforms every few months. 

Let’s use my content calendar for example. I wrote a blog post about how to organize your content calendar using Trello in the spring. By the time summer hit, I had moved on from Trello and started using Airtable as my content tracker and Asana as my content calendar. I even dedicated an entire module in my social media marketing course for small business owners about how to effectively manage your content planning using Airtable. This course, Social Content Catalyst, launched in November 2020, and now, here we are… a few days away from 2021 and I decided to transfer my Airtable content calendar over to Clickup. 

Don’t mind me, just over here WASTING time trying to commit to a platform that’s supposed to SAVE time and increase efficiency. 

I stand by my statements about how much I love Trello, Airtable, and Asana. They’re all amazing tools that help you stay productive as a small business owner. 

Meanwhile, my peers kept ranting and raving about how wonderful ClickUp has been for their business and I was being a Karen. Constantly complaining to them about how I already switched platforms THREE times and couldn’t possibly try something else.

That was my consistent battle cry until my coach showed me exactly how she was running her business – like literally every organizational aspect of her business – inside of ClickUp. 

Oh hunnnniiee!  **queue Disney music epiphany moment**

That was the moment I was SOLD.

My ENTIRE business can live inside of one platform? And seamlessly link to Google Drive, Slack, Zoom, and basically any other tool I’m using in my business???  Take my money and let’s do this thing.

Wondering why I’m telling you this story? No, it’s not to sell you on clicking an affiliate link to Clickup. (Which by the way, are included in this post!) I’m sharing this story with you because I want you to be aware of the unproductive productivity cycle. 

Before you invest time or money into a productivity platform, do your research.  

When I first jumped on the Trello bandwagon, I didn’t know what type of platform I needed. I just knew that everyone in my industry was praising it so I gave it a try. It was free after all, so how much of an investment would I really be making? I learned the hard way that your time can be a much bigger investment than your money.

Trying to make the platform work for my brain (which really likes clean/minimal appearances) was wasting more time than if I just kept using post-it notes in my notebooks. That’s when I took the leap over to Asana and Airtable. But now I was using TWO platforms to be *efficient* instead of one. What the?? 

Looking back, these blimps in productivity seem silly, but at the time I just kept telling myself that I could make it work. 

And truth be told, I did make it work, but it was just that… additional work.

When you find an efficient platform that truly works for you, schedule a day to transfer over your workflows. 

You did your research, you picked your platform, and now it’s time to be productive. 

Instead of piecing together your new workflows as you need them, dedicate an entire day to transferring everything over so all your assets are together and ready for you. 

Then (get ready for this) DELETE your old accounts. If you keep old accounts active, there’s a chance you’ll resort to the information stored inside of these accounts rather than properly integrating them into the new account. 

The goal of your productivity platform is to be a one-stop shop for all things in your business. No matter which productivity app you choose, you want to have one place where you can track all outstanding to-do’s and manage your tasks. Logging into multiple accounts is not efficient or productive so start streamlining everything into one platform.

Create templates for all your recurring tasks. 

Whether you’re using Trello, Asana, or Clickup, I strongly recommend you start creating templated tasks. 

Where you store/organize these templates will differ per platform, but the idea remains the same.

If you’re frequently following the same workflow or completing a series of tasks repetitively, create a templated task that you can easily duplicate whenever you need to re-assign the job. 

For example, if you follow a certain workflow when creating a new blog post create a new task labeled [TEMPLATE – New Blog]. Within that templated task, create subtasks of all the steps that need to be completed each time you create a new blog post, including any copy starters that will be needed when publishing your content (headlines, subheadlines, SEO, etc.). 

When you have these templates set up, you don’t ever need to stress about missing a step of the content creation process and you’ve saved yourself from having to list out the steps every time you re-do this task. 

Productivity Tips Recap:

1. Choose a platform for productivity only after you’ve researched the features and how it can serve your efficiency process. 
2. Streamline your workflows and migrate everything over to your new platform.
3. Delete any old accounts so you’re not tempted to dabble in multiple platforms.
4. Create templates for recurring tasks to save time and increase efficiency.

What’s your go-to productivity app? Send me a DM and tell me why you love it.