I’m a gadget girl. I still haven’t conquered my shiny object syndrome. However, there is one single tool I’ve been loyal to ever since I started my business.

And that’s… Post-its®. 🙂

They’re the most versatile, handy tool to think through my own systems and help my clients turn designing systems into a fun game.

 

 

3 Ways Post-Its Can Transform Your Business

1.  Use Post-its® to Manage Your Tasks

Keeping tasks in your head is the worst thing you can do when trying to manage your work.

You’ll get stuck in a reactive mode and the Chaos stage. Every task will be “urgent” because you know that if you don’t do it right away, it won’t get done (or not get done on time). You’ll also wind up managing your business out of your inbox and won’t have time for any strategic work.

Plus, you won’t be able to objectively assess what’s on your plate, set priorities, and be proactive.

Resolve the situation with Post-its®.

Work with a weekly task list instead of a daily task list.

Begin with listing everything that needs to happen in your business on a weekly basis.

Take a bunch of Post-its® and write each task on each individual one. Pick different colors for different tasks (administrative, business maintenance, business development, etc.).

Next, get a large board and divide it into 3 columns: To Do, Doing, Done. You’re creating a simple Kanban Board.

Stick your Post-its® with tasks that you need to accomplish that week under the To Do category. On a daily basis, review your weekly To Do list and move the items from the Do to Doing column, and, once you complete them, into the Done column.

When selecting items to work on, assess how urgent they are. If an item has an approaching deadline, make sure to start with that one. Also, take into account your energy levels. For example, if you are a morning person, work on your creative tasks during the first half of the day and leave more mechanical tasks for later on.

At the end of the week, do a quick weekly review and analyze what happened.

Don’t be too critical of yourself – your goal is to find a way to work faster, not to judge yourself:

• Are there are too many items in the Doing column, are the tasks are too big? – You’ve got to break them down into smaller pieces (e.g., replace “write a blog post” with “select topic for a blog post, create an outline, write the first draft, finalize the post”).
• If there’s a category you didn’t even touch, see if they can be temporarily be taken off your list or delegated.
• If you haven’t moved too many items from the To Do column, but worked all week on other people’s stuff, maybe it’s time to establish better boundaries.

Managing tasks using sticky notes can help you make your tasks and your progress more visible and increase your self-awareness.

Before you know it, you’ll move from the Chaos to Clarity stage.

2.  Optimize Your Systems with Post-its®

Free up your time for strategic work like optimizing workflows for activities to grow your business further by mastering project management.

Post-its® can help here as well!

Take a bunch of Post-its® and write out the steps you take to perform a workflow (e.g. client intake/on-boarding, blogging, guest posting, etc).  Get a large board and arrange the notes in the order the steps happen at the moment.

Look at the picture objectively to see which actions are totally redundant and which will get you the best results—the fastest. Are there any places where you can get rid of some of the Post-its®?  Can you substitute two old ones with a single new one?  Now you visualize the new course of action.

There you go!  You’ve just optimized a system in your business.

Yes, I oversimplified things.  Figuring out the “right” pieces for your system often a bit of guidance and feedback from someone who can take an objective look at your system. That’s why in Systematic Success we break each system into moving pieces and then together create a sequence of steps that work best for you and your business.

Optimizing your workflows will allow you to become more efficient when you do those activities yourself and when you delegate a part or even the entire process.

That’s how you free up yourself to make serious Impact.

3.  Design Product Systems Using Post-its®

The Impact stage of your business is about taking a 10,000-foot view of your business and optimizing your entire business model so that all the pieces of your business work together to create, deliver, and exchange value.

Post-its® to the rescue 🙂

Discover new opportunities for your business by taking a large board and drawing a horizontal line from one end to another. This line represents the journey of your ideal customer—from the point where they are ready to work with you until the point they reach your vision for them.

The starting point of my customer’s journey is somewhere in the middle of the Chaos stage (they have to be at their wit’s end to ask me for support) and the end point is the beginning of the Ripple Effect stage.

So, my mission is to help my clients to get over the Chaos, create Clarity, and make Impact.

What about you?

Next, take a bunch of Post-its® and write down the names of your offerings. Looking at the line, stick the notes to the respective part of your customer journey.

Analyze what you see:

• Big gap between two notes? It could mean that your customers can’t naturally move from one offer to another. There is probably a new offering opportunity there.
• Two or more notes practically on top of the other? It might mean that you have several variations of the same product or service. Pick the best format and eliminate the rest.
• See a note (offering) that generates the most sales? Maybe you could add another note (introduce another offering) to leverage the high-performer.

Bonus points if you take another set of Post-its®, preferably in different colors, and write down different ways you market/promote each one of your offerings.

Once you have your Post-its® tapestry, note where you don’t have the necessary marketing and sales activities to bring in the desired number of customers for each offering.

All these insights will help you to work on the next offering or build the next marketing channel in an intentional way to make the most impact with your work.

Back to You

Do you use Post-its® in your business? If yes, what do you use them for?