Are You Productive or Just Busy? How to Make Progress in Your Cleaning Business

Your daily to-do list is probably a mile long, but despite being constantly busy it seems like you never get anything accomplished. Life seems to always get in the way, preventing you from making real and meaningful progress on achieving your goals.

A full schedule doesn't necessarily equal progress and being busy isn't always a sign of productivity. In fact, underperforming business owners and managers often work as hard or harder than their more successful peers.

Your day may be filled with activities like responding to emails, researching a piece of equipment, checking in on clients, and visiting employees at a few worksites. You're like a child on a rocking horse—there's plenty of movement, but you aren't actually going anywhere.

The truth is, it doesn't matter how much you get done in a day if the tasks filling your time aren't in service of your big-picture professional goals.

The difference between being busy and being productive is to stop thinking and acting like an employee and instead become a true leader. Here are the keys to making that shift.

Busy or productive? How to make progress

To Be More Productive, Let Go and Delegate

Researching equipment is important, but it doesn't do much to contribute to your company's growth. Responding to emails is necessary, but it doesn't move a business to the next level.

Evaluate the activities that fill up your time and decide what you can offload onto someone else. Whenever possible, it's best to delegate:

• tedious tasks that someone else could do for less than you're paid,
• tasks that create stress or drain you of passion,
• tasks that someone else could do better than you.

Some items can be outsourced to paid professionals. Others can be handed over to your best team members after you provide appropriate training. Creating well-documented procedures for delegated tasks will help ensure a smooth transition and allow another employee to take over the process if needed.

To be clear, there is a big difference between delegating tasks and dumping them.

• Delegation is empowering an employee to take over a task, but continuing to monitor them to help them be successful.
• Dumping a task is handing off work without providing the tools or authority needed to allow them to be successful.

If you delegate tasks correctly, it will help free your time to work on your important leadership duties. What could you remove from your plate? Meeting with new clients or interviewing new employees might stay on your schedule for now. Fixing a broken vacuum cleaner or running administrative errands? Those are things you can delegate.

Think Big When it Comes to Being Productive

By delegating and outsourcing less-impactful tasks, you can free up more time to do things like:

Craft a plan of action
Where is your company headed in the next one or 5 years? Spending time working on your company's roadmap for success is a smart way to help your management team to understand your vision. After getting their feedback and buy-in on your big-picture vision, write out a one-page plan of action each quarter for how you and the team will move closer to the goals. Be sure to include your management team on the action plan process so they take ownership of the areas they're responsible for.

Improve company culture
Company culture is the values, practices, and beliefs shared internally by employees and management, and reflected externally to clients, customers, vendors, and others. It plays a large role in creating long-term employees and customers. By positively affecting morale and culture, you help increase your employees' and customers' satisfaction, both of which positively affect profits.

Develop your team
Perhaps the most important job of a cleaning business owner is to build and develop their team. How can you recognize your star players? How can you help those who are struggling? Who could be groomed for a leadership role? Where are there holes in your team? What can you do to create more unity? Investing energy here will pay dividends.

To go from being busy to making progress, you'll need to stop thinking like a cleaning technician or front-line supervisor and start spending time on activities that create real, lasting growth for you and your company. You only have so many hours in a day. Don't burn yourself out filling your schedule with busywork.