September 17, 2022

RD2A: A Four-Stage Productivity Cycle

Here’s a four-stage cycle you can use to increase your productivity without wasting a lot of time and money:

Reclaim—Stop doing the stuff that is delivering the least results. This could be anything from deleting social media apps from your phone to firing your least profitable clients.
Document—Create a written Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for anything you do more than once. Stuff like your weekly podcast recording session, your bi-weekly office hours, your monthly financial projections, or your occasional client onboarding process.
Delegate—Bring in one or more contractors to run your SOPs for you. Make sure that they know they are allowed to improve the SOP as long as they update the SOP to reflect their changes.
Automate—Set up software automations to replace your contractors. This could be plugging systems together with no-code solutions like Zapier or hiring a developer to write some custom code for you.

NOTE: You don’t have to run this cycle across every area of your business at the same time.

Once you’ve reclaimed some time with stage 1, you can be at different stages of the cycle in different areas of your business.

For example, you could be at the Document stage with your weekly podcast, the Delegation stage with your invoicing, and at the Automation stage with your content marketing.

ASIDE: I like to create acronyms for things to make them easier to remember. The obvious acronym for this would be RDDA, but that’s hard to say, so I like RD2A better. Plus, RD2A sounds like a droid from Star Wars, so that’s a major bonus ;-)

Here’s the thing...

Increasing your productivity makes very little sense if you are trading time for money.

So if you’re still renting yourself out by the hour, “stage zero” is to stop.

Yours,

—J