How many of the regular tasks required to run your business do you actually enjoy doing? For most people a large amount of their time is spent performing tasks which they find both unfulfilling and uninteresting.
Even when we perform tasks regularly if they're a little complex we still sometimes make silly mistakes which have to be fixed later.
What we really need is a way to eliminate mistakes on tasks we perform regularly, make those tasks more efficient to free up our time and then find a way of simply not doing the tasks we really dislike.
Only in an ideal world you might be thinking? Well, I'm about to tell you how you can achieve all of this and it's not even that difficult once you know how.
Proceduralise Everything There are good reasons why you should proceduralise and document everything you do in your business.
However, lets start with the most important tasks to proceduralise, the ones you perform regularly.
For example, when I write and publish a blog post there's certain tasks involved which I repeat for every post.
Find a striking image, choose a catchy title, use certain keywords to make it easy to find in search engines, choose a category, choose the tags, etc, etc.
There's certain standards which I wish to achieve with every post like layout and consistency, relevance and regularity.
There's also specific methods I use to publish it like Twitter, Facebook and my mailing list.
So how do I ensure that I never make a silly mistake, never miss out something important and maintain the standards I have set myself? Easy, I write checklists for everything.
That way, nothing important ever gets missed and I can maintain a certain set of standards without fail.
The small overhead of writing a checklist is far outweighed by the benefits.
Before I used checklists for my blog I quite often made silly mistakes.
I'd forget to choose a category, use inconsistent formatting and sometimes even forget to use an image.
Now none of that happens, checklists have changed everything.
There's also another very good reason for creating checklists which I'll explain in the last section.
Streamline Your Processes Once you have your checklists in place and have started to use them you may still find better, more efficient ways to do things.
That's great, just update the checklists as you go so from that point on you'll always use the better, more efficient methods.
Take a good look at your checklists and identify tasks which you don't really need to do and remove them.
I did this recently with my invoicing checklist.
I was still printing out a copy of all my invoices and statements for myself and storing them safely.
I recently realised that this was ridiculous because I have electronic copies of everything so there's no point printing out copies unless I specifically need them.
I updated my checklists and threw away old printed copies.
Along with a few other changes I've halved the time it takes to do my invoicing now and I rarely make mistakes.
This might not sound like too big a deal but for me it means I can spend a little more time doing what I enjoy doing and less time on the phone to my accountant correcting errors.
Ok, so now you have your processes in place in the form of checklists and you've streamlined them to save yourself time and effort.
You're doing well so far, but the next step is the big one and I think you'll like it.
Outsource Mundane Tasks Even though you've made your regular tasks more consistent, error free and efficient you still have to spend your valuable time doing them right? Wrong, you're now ready to perform step number three and this is the Holy Grail of running an efficient business, freeing up a significant amount of your time and allowing you to expand your business without limits.
You now need to outsource the tasks you still don't enjoy performing, let someone else do them.
The real beauty of this entire system is that you're now in an excellent position to outsource any of your tasks.
The reason being, you have already created processes, you already have the checklists and you've already streamlined them.
Just hand over your checklists to someone else and say "here you go, follow this to the letter".
For some tasks you may have to run though an example or two but with everything documented it's easy to hand over this stuff to someone else now.
Whether you use contractors, virtual assistants, friends, family, existing employees or anyone who's available to help, the point is, you no longer have to perform the mundane tasks you don't enjoy.
If you don't already have any employees simply taking a look at all of the tasks you could have someone else do might be what triggers you to hire your first employee.
What You Should Do Next I'd urge you to start now by picking one task which you perform regularly, whether it's daily, weekly or even monthly it doesn't matter.
Choose a task that's particularly mundane, complex or prone to errors.
Now follow the process described here for that one task and see how it improves things.
If you're happy with the results, repeat the process for another task, until you've been through them all.
Remember, freeing yourself from performing mundane tasks allows you to concentrate your efforts on what really matters in your business and your life.
Don't underestimate the power of this process, it really can change your life for the better.