Collapsing Timelines: How Business Owners Can Get More Done, Faster!

Productivity. Scalability. Profitability. The ultimate trifecta for every business owner out there. To excel in all three, there’s one question we have to answer to make it all possible: how do we get more done, faster?

As the co-founder and CEO of Kardia (which offers heart-centered financial services to help people reach their goals) and leader of 14 thriving businesses, I have had to make productivity and time management key focuses in my day-to-day life. I have learned some key tips for collapsing timelines, but they will seem completely backward and counterproductive. However, if you apply the practices, you’ll accelerate your business in a mind-blowing way.

Stop Working

It’s a physical fact that when you’re extremely focused in your thinking, your ability to be creative shrinks because all your energy is going in one direction. You need creativity if you want to boost your productivity and figure out ways to do things bigger, better and faster.

Creativity comes when your brain is relaxed, which is when it can make connections between ideas that you didn’t think of before. That is why so many people get inspiration in the shower — during this time, you’re not thinking about anything specific, so brilliance has room to strike.

That’s why it is important to stop working, and give yourself time to relax. Let your mind wander and you’ll be surprised at the insights and solutions that come to life. But the key to making that happen is to make sure that “do nothing” appointment you make with yourself never gets bumped, otherwise you’ll end up in a reactive doing mode, which feels like you’re getting stuff done, but is really just slowing down your growth.

Break Your Systems

You constantly hear that if you want to scale you have to get systems and automation in place. That’s absolutely true, but if you want to collapse timelines, you have to figure out how to do it better and faster. That means breaking the systems you set up, to find ways to make them even more effective.

When you have a big vision, the only way you’re going to be able to make that vision come to life is to enlist others to help you. If you can do it all on your own, your vision isn’t big enough and you’re not going to make the impact you were really meant to make.

All you really have to do is be clear on your end goal, then allow other people to come in and contribute to it from all different angles. It’s only with those new perspectives that you’ll collapse your timelines in a massive way and figure out the new systems or tweaks to your current systems to help you do it.

Be sure to get your team involved in this process too. They’ll see things that you don’t. For example, they’ll know where they needlessly lose time or what’s causing bottlenecks in their workday. Then, get them to brainstorm solutions to fix the issues to become more productive. New perspectives open new possibilities, and as an added bonus, if your team is generating the solutions, they’re going to have a lot more buy-in when it comes to making the change, and that means you’ll be able to get it done much faster. That’s a lot more productive from the get-go.

Retreat

Complacency and doubt are two of your biggest challenges as a business owner. If you’re not constantly growing personally and professionally, you’re falling behind because, guaranteed, your competitors won’t be taking the back seat on expanding themselves and their market share. And, if you’re hesitating on decisions because you’re not quite sure of the next step or how to accomplish it, you’ll end up in the same boat, and that status quo will definitely create drag for your business, slowing down your growth and profitability.

That’s when it is vital to retreat and get a mindset reset, so you can regroup and make the decisions that will help you move forward faster.

To be at the top of your game and have the ability to collapse timelines, you have to constantly look for ways to level up your thinking and that means learning from people who think differently than you and have a different set of experiences. That kind of learning can improve your decision-making process too, because you can see new angles you just couldn’t before.

Dedicate time to build your network inside and outside your industry. Explore with those contacts new ways of getting better at business. Ask them what they do in challenging situations and consider how you can apply them to your own business to make it, and you, more productive. Work with mindset coaches, join masterminds, or at the very least educate yourself in a brand-new area. Even if that area is nowhere near what you do, the things you learn about a new topic might spark something new in your business, as your brain puts together a creative solution in your “do nothing” time.

Those are the things that will improve your impact and help you scale faster, and your profitability will grow right along with it.

Summing It Up

Seemingly counterproductive practices can actually be the gas your business needs to rev up and keep going. Once you take a step back and start looking at your business, and the tasks you personally perform within it, through a different lens, you’ll start to find ways to improve efficiency. Enlist other people to help you and you’ll do it even faster. Before you know it, you’ll be making a massive impact on the world and because you are, the trifecta for productivity, scalability and profitability will be yours and your business will be running like a well-oiled machine… until you break it again to make it run even better.