In today's "instant gratification" information age, it's easy sometimes to work really hard and end up accomplishing nothing at all! There's never been a more critical time for developing the best plan to ensure you and your teams are always working on the right things at the right time. Here are three different concepts that, if enacted simultaneously, should take you a long way toward making sure your priorities are always being set and reset properly:



1. E-mail - it is imperative that you develop a strong personal policy on how you and your teams will use and respond to e-mail. It might be that you choose several times during your day that you will check e-mail, and then simply don't allow yourself to check it other than at those times. You will also want to minimize the number of times you "touch" each e-mail, but it's not always practical to take action on EVERY e-mail, the minute you read it. Therefore, you need a system which allows you to read and respond to your e-mail, but in priority order. One such tool you might employ is the "Getting Things Done" Outlook add-in by NetCentrics Corp, which allows you to "action" every e-mail instantly, even if your "action" happens to be - "add this to my to-do list."

2. Written versus "in person" - speaking of e-mail, sometimes the e-mail that's gone back and forth between you and your colleagues could have been settled more appropriately with a phone call, or a walk down the hall. The trick here is to determine which scenarios are more effectively done in person, and just making a conscious effort before drafting each e-mail to think to yourself: "would this message be more appropriately delivered in person and/or would it be resolved more quickly with less confusion if I did?" Awareness can be the key here to being more efficient with your time.

3. Consider outsourcing - in every business, there are tasks that can be outsourced, yet not every business takes advantage of that. You must consider the role you play at your company, and your hourly rate, and then compare those things against the tasks that are taking up large amounts of your time. Does your hourly rate match up appropriately with the many tasks you're doing, or could someone with a lower hourly rate work on those tasks for you, freeing you up to work on more strategic projects (which are probably higher in priority for you, anyway). "Outsourcing" can mean anything from getting good at delegating to employees and/or co-workers, and looking into ways that freelancers and consultants can make sense for portions of your workload.

The three concepts above are fairly simple but can make powerful changes in your productivity when coupled together at the same time. Maximizing your productivity with the limited resources available will ALWAYS be the tricky part of streamlining your business, so make sure you're focused on ways to better identify your true priorities - and the rest should fall into place!