5 bad business habits and what it's doing to your productivity

Written on the 28 April 2015 by Snap Marketing

No one is perfect. We are all guilty of making mistakes what's important is that we don't repeat them.

Being productive isn't easy, regardless of how badly you'd like to be and how hard we work to be. Increasing your output at work, and what you do outside of work, is a much more reachable goal (as long as you don't impair yourself with bad habits).

When we begin overloading ourselves with responsibilities, we tend to be doing ourselves more harm than good. Our business suffers, our quality-of-life-suffers, and our quality of service drops below what we're known for.

Here are 5 things you should stop doing now:

1. Taking on too many roles and responsibilities: If we're not careful, our business can really suffer from this. This is because now, we don't have time for strategy or the big picture. We get lost in our daily tasks, and the rest of the business in is impacted. What's worse, with a heavy workload and too many responsibilities, is our families feel neglected as we have less and less time for them.
2. Hitting the snooze button: This is something a lot of us are very guilty of. It may feel like hitting the snooze button in the morning gives you that little bit more rest before you begin your day, but truth be told, this is doing you more harm than good. When you first wake up, your endocrine system begins to release alertness hormones to get you ready for the day. When you hit that snooze button, and go back to sleep, you slow down this process right down and as a result, it takes you longer to properly wake up.
3. Thinking short term: Small business owners are constantly putting out fires, as well as keeping up with the day-to-day duties of running a business. But if you don't set aside some time to focus on you company's future, you might not have one. Even if it's only an hour each week, it's important to review your business's progress and your own goals. Make time for quarterly reviews with your key people, and discuss in-depth strategies and how to take your business to the next level.
4. Ignoring mobile marketing: Is your website mobile friendly? The latest Google algorithm update kicks in on the 21st of April and your business could suffer. What this means, is that Google will judge you on whether you're mobile friendly or not. If you're not, and you're competitors are, Google will automatically rank them higher in their search engine rankings every businesses worst nightmare. But don't panic, there are plenty of companies that can make certain this doesn't happen to you.
5. Not having a blog on your website: Adding fresh content to your website at least 3 times a week is ideal for all businesses. This is a method to help you rise organically in search engine rankings, and it has been reported that posting as little as one or two times a month can help generate 70% more leads than competitors who don't have a blog. Further, those who posted 6 to 8 times a month almost doubled their amount of leads. To begin, it may seem like a lot of work but consider what you could be missing out on.

Did this help? We all have our bad habits, some worse than others, but it's up to us to identify these habits and improve where we can.