Guest Blog by Barton Consulting (originally posted at https://barton-consultingllc.com/2017/10/30/do-you-use-routines-in-your-business/)
Do you use routines in your business? I bet that you do. You see, routines are the actions we take to get stuff done. We use routines so that we don’t have to come up with new ways every day to handle the hundreds of things we must manage or complete. With good routines, we are free to concentrate on delighting our customers.
We all receive help from having a good routine. Depending on whose statistics you use, email can eat up over half of your day. As a small business owner or manager that is time that you are not spending with your client. In fact, Alexandra Samuel in a Harvard Business Review article suggested setting up an email time budget. You win twice: once by setting limits on your energy investment and twice by having a set of steps to handle the email content. Saving your decision-making energy is important!
Scientists have been studying decision-making and why we sometimes don’t make good decisions. Their findings suggest that our energy level for decision-making is limited. This decision fatigue affects the quality of our decisions. So, having routines to handle the usual stuff is an excellent business practice. Chris Meyers has some insightful thoughts about being a business owner and decision fatigue in this Forbes article.
But did you know, a routine is a process by another name? When we talk about business processes sometimes all the jargon intimidates us. The goal of this blog is to show you how you can improve your business processes and not go crazy at the same time. There are 1,440 minutes in a day. That’s all. Take 15 minutes out of the 1,440 available and list the routines you follow in your business every day. These are the processes that drive your business success. Are you happy with them?