A Real-Life Productivity Case Study: From Busy to Intentional
I worked with a client last week.
She is also a friend, a networking partner, a fellow business owner. Call her what you want. I will call her… Jane. Of course that is not her name, but it is today! I assured her, when I asked permission to write about her, that all names, as they say, are changed to protect the innocent!
Jane is all of these things that I mentioned - a friend, network partner, client, business owner - and more.
Jane and I have known each other a long time, we met in a women’s networking group many years ago. Like most of my clients, she is amazing and also very organized! But also, like most of my clients, she needs more hours in the day to be as amazing as she wants to be!
Jane and I have worked in her physical space, in her office and also her creative space, and this week, she asked if we could start our session talking about productivity before jumping into our hands-on project for the day, and of course I said yes!
I’m going to approach this topic like a case study. A real-life application of the productivity tools I talk about to help you imagine how to apply the tools to your own life as well.
Jane has recently changed roles and assumed more responsibilities in both her personal and professional life, and felt now would be a good time for a productivity conversation. She is high performing and doing a great job but would also like to do some things better, or with more ease. She holds too many details and data points in her head every day and feels there could be better ways to manage all of them.
Sound familiar? I thought so.
A little more about Jane:
Her company is in sales, and is grounded in professional interactions with highly personalized client care.
She would like to serve her current clients well and even increase her sales to current clients.
She would like to grow her business and add to her client base and feels that she can increase her marketing and social media presence to gain new clients.
She would like to learn more about new advancements in her industry, towards better client care and increasing sales, and participate regularly in industry professional development.
She would like to make time for the Business Building tasks, the CEO / Strategic Planning and Goal Setting that doesn’t seem to make it on the list from day to day in the midst of the work associated with running the business.
She wants to set up her technology so that she can handle client care and business tasks remotely from her Ipad as she travels, to have better work-life balance with her family.
Again, sound familiar?
Yes, Jane is a real person. However, she also sounds like so many of my productivity clients and even myself as I run my own company in the midst of the rest of my life. It is easier to think about just one person as I write this article, but I have 20+ current clients, and this list of wants is similar to at least half of them!
Jane was seeking suggestions to add productivity tools to effectively care for her vitally important client and business tasks that pay the bills, and ALSO get to some of those bigger picture tasks to build the business and the client base, increasing revenue and longevity for herself and her company.
As we got started, I asked Jane to walk me through a typical day, acknowledging successes and also pain points. Some of this information came up in the intake, but here’s the recap:
Successes:
Jane has a clear vision of what she and her company offer their clients.
Jane has a great grasp of technology, many technological tools available to her and the acumen to learn to use them better.
Jane has a clear vision for what she wants to accomplish every day. She is a list maker and keeps the list close at hand because she knows she is a visual processor and that having the list nearby helps her.
Pain Points:
Jane carries too much information in her head, and would like better systems.
Jane gets distracted from her plans, and would like to strike a better balance between a quick response to client requests and continuing with her own plan for the day.
For example, a request from a customer will come up and she will think “I know I'm working on my quarterly taxes right now, but surely I can take five minutes and fulfill that client order.” She responds to the client but then gets distracted again by something else and never gets back to the taxes. Client requests mean sales, and sales pay the bills, but she wants to get back more quickly to her planned work.
Jane wants to spend time in her already busy schedule for professional development, marketing and new client calls, social media and strategic planning.
Productivity Tool: Clear Responsibilities and Job Description
Because Jane is great like that, she had already done some work before our appointment. She had written down all the tasks she was required to do to keep her business running smoothly (this would have been my first suggestion!). I won’t get too specific, but she wrote down things like:
Following up on current client proposals for new products
Current clients: Accounts receivables
Current clients: personally reaching out regarding supply orders
Accounts payable
Answering the phone and checking email
Paying quarterly taxes
She had another page of projects and goals and ideas she hasn’t yet done but would like to work on:
She’s collected names and emails for a mailing list for many years, but does not regularly send out emails to the list
Social media
Marketing
Strategic planning
Setting up her ipad with her client database and the parent company for her
She did a great job at thoroughly capturing the tasks she completes. As we looked at that list, I asked about Realistic Time Estimates and the Frequency of the tasks.
Productivity Tool: Realistic Time Estimates
One homework project will be to attach the frequency of each task and also realistic time estimates for them. For example, Jane pays quarterly taxes which obviously happen every three months (frequency) and takes up to three days each quarter to prepare and pay.
On the other hand, Jane realized that a few days a week for perhaps an hour total on those days, she can check her parent company’s website to determine which of her clients may need to reorder supplies and can reach out to those clients, improving client care and increasing sales.
Now that she has identified the tasks, how long they take and how often to do them, they can go to her To Do list.
Productivity Tool: Your Done List
If you also want to tackle this type of process, too, referring to your Done List that I recently talked about could help you identify what tasks you are spending your time on from day to day. Jane can look back at her past To-Do Lists if she is curious about other tasks she needs to add to the list.
Productivity Tool: To-Do Lists
Once we have the tasks that need to be completed every day or week or month or quarter, etc., we can craft our To-Do lists. Jane is already good at pairing up her tasks she needs to complete with regularity with her available work time each day, and making that to-do list.
Productivity Tool: Master To-Do Lists
In addition to daily To-Do lists, I suggested to Jane and also to you, consider creating a Master To-Do List. This is the list of all the things in all the areas all at once. It can feel and look a little intimidating, but it is helpful to have a place to park all the tasks for today and also some day.
I know this is a Jane Case Study, but to help explain:
At the end of my Master To-Do list for my company, I have For January, 2027,
Renew my ICD membership,
a specific list of end of year Money Tasks like
Generate 1099s,
create a quicken report for this current year and send to my accountant,
fetch my W2s, and
even a January 2029 task to Recertify my CPO (an every three year task).
Honestly, I am relieved to park those long term items on the Master To-Do list so I am confident I won’t lose them.
Productivity Tool: Today’s Top Three / Daily Planning practice
Ok, back to Today’s To-Do List. In March, I shared my Today’s Top Three article where I recommended creating an end of day planning session for the next day, or a first thing in the morning session for the day.
Jane recognized the value in more consistently capturing her client follow up tasks from day to day. For example, she identified that after she sends a proposal to an existing client for new products, she relies on her memory to remind her to follow up after a few days, and she admits that doesn’t always happen as planned! She realized that looking at Today’s To-Do list and also her Done List is a more reliable way to remember when in the next few days she should reach out to that client.
Productivity Tool: Daily Routines
There are tasks we all have to do as part of our work day. Jane and I discussed, for example, the first 5 tasks every day in the first 10 minutes, or the things to do when she gets back from lunch, or the few things to do before ending her work day. Tasks like checking the company’s voice mail, checking in on her To-Do List and Today’s Top Three, a quick email review to add anything new to today’s To Do list, bank deposits, checking the mail, etc.
Productivity Tool: Standard Operating Procedures / Template Tasks
Jane has taken great strides in recent months to streamline her client processes, like creating, sending and tracking new and current client proposals for new products. Again, without getting too specific, as part of Jane’s company’s excellent client service, she regularly updates her current clients on warranty information, potential maintenance and repairs, inventory re-orders and upgrades.
She clearly walked me through the updated process she initiates with all her clients. My suggestion for Jane was that she could document the Standard Operating Procedure that every client goes through, make it repeatable, and then track where each client is in that procedure or process from day to day so she didn’t have to keep all of those data points in her head all the time.
She has created and also improved the process - Hooray! - now, she can let the process work better for her!
Productivity Tools: Batch Work / Time Blocking / The Pomodoro Method
As Jane and I discussed her daily and weekly work, her client care processes and finally tackling some of the long neglected professional development sessions, and marketing and social media projects, she stated that Time Blocking these batches of work made sense to her.
Batch Work is collecting similar types of tasks together, like taking care of client billing for many clients all at once on a given day, or working on her accounts payables twice a month to keep current on her bill paying.
An insightful awareness that Jane identified was that if she used Batch Work for her important work like client follow up and writing proposals and accounts receivable and payables, she wouldn’t feel the need to worry about all of those areas of her work when that WASN’T the batch she needed to focus on today. She could trust the process and that the important work would get done in a timely manner at planned times during her week.
And Batch Work dovetails nicely with Time Blocking.
Time Blocking is breaking our work day into pieces, perhaps 1-2 hours each, for batches of work or to work on bigger projects, with time in between to answer emails, phone messages or texts, or grab lunch or shift mental gears for a little while, and then get back to work on the batches of work or projects that you want to work on today. These scheduled breaks, similar to the Pomodoro Method, also give her an opportunity to check in on her daily To Do list and Today’s Top Three, to make sure she’s getting to her important work.
Time Blocking and Batch Work help us to manage those inevitable interruptions by putting some boundaries on our responses and therefore protecting our focus.
Productivity Tool: Goal Setting / Quarterly Planning
We didn’t use the Goal Setting tools like SMART goals or PACT goals that I’ve talked about, at least not yet, but Jane has goals and knows what she is working towards.
Whew! Case Study Complete! Thanks for walking through my client’s recent productivity experience with me.
Do you see yourself in any of the narrative? I love a good Case Study to help us personalize productivity tools and strategies, identifying where in our own personal and professional lives we can employ the tools, too!
Let me know your thoughts, and as always, reach out to me if it’s time to add more productivity tools to your days as well!
