This post is a collaboration between our Process Street Team and Corey Fradin, Founder of QuickBooost. Exploring topics like productivity, time management, and goal setting, QuickBooost helps you better utilize and take control of your time.

The pursuit of productivity is often simplified to a hero’s fable involving the conquest of willpower; the reality might be more about the systems we build around our work, and the clever things we do to make work easier.

You only have 24 hours in a day. You can reduce the problem of productivity to: How many tasks can I get done in that 24 hour period?

What you choose to do with your time – which tasks you prioritize, which you choose to delegate, which you choose to automate, all of these factors are directly the result of the productivity system you build around your work.

You already have a productivity system, you just might not realize. Even if you don’t feel productive, you can still look at what you’re currently doing and understand it in terms of some kind of system.

What that means is, you can break the situation into parts, like your goals, objectives, strategies, and tactics; how all of these things work together amounts to your productivity system.

Take for example David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology. The GTD method is basically the idea of achieving mental focus by writing down your main tasks, and figuring out how you can break them down into smaller, more immediately actionable tasks.

This is a type of productivity system.

So, in this article, we’ll be looking at:

• What a productivity system actually is
• Why productivity systems are important
• How to build a simple productivity system
• Best practice tips on how to be productive
• Continuously improving your productivity system
• Extra productivity resources

In essence a productivity system is a lot like a straightforward process that helps you break down your workload into smaller, more manageable chunks, and ultimately do more work, more efficiently.

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At Process Street, we’re all about process optimization: creating, implementing, analyzing, mapping, improving, and automating.

There are a lot of layers to processes and it’s easy to get caught up in the complexities.

But really, it’s quite simple.

You need to document your workflow and then follow it, making improvements where necessary over time; continuous improvement.

All of this can be summed up by the concept of process optimization.

In this Process Street article, we’ll give you a quick actionable overview of how to optimize your processes with some tips and tricks of what to look for and how to do it.

We’ll cover:

• Process optimization basics: What you need to get started
• The business process optimization workflow
• How to work out the goals of your process optimization
• How to optimize processes with automation
• Process optimization resources to get started now

Bidding for jobs can be cutthroat.

Not only do you have to create an accurate estimate of how much everything will cost, but you have to do so as quickly as possible to have the best chance of securing the customer.

You don’t want to waste time filling out forms when you could be working, but any mistakes can severely damage your chances of getting the sale (if the estimate is too high) or even ruin your reputation (if the estimate is too low).

That’s why we here at Process Street have created and gathered these 14 free estimate templates.

Instead of having to create your own job estimate form, all you have to do is look through the templates below and see which one you like best. All serve the purpose of giving your clients a professional job estimate document, but allowing you to just fill in basic details instead of creating each document from the ground up.

Just head for one of the following sections and make your pick:

• General free estimate templates
• Microsoft Word job estimate templates
• Microsoft Excel estimate templates
• PDF estimate templates

One of the key parts of driving your business forward is being able to identify and tackle muda.

Is a process taking too long? Is it creating a bottleneck? Are your workers struggling to be productive?

In this Process Street article, we look again at what managers can learn from the Toyota Production System about how to improve your business processes.

The specific concept we’re tackling is muda. Muda translates roughly as waste, and refers to the inefficiencies within processes which you can seek to reduce or eliminate entirely.

As Rene T. Domingo outlines in his paper Identifying and Eliminating The Seven Wastes or Muda for the Asian Institute of Management:

The elimination of waste is the primary goal of any lean system. In effect, lean declares war on waste – any waste. Waste or muda is anything that does not have value or does not add value. Waste is something the customer will not pay for.

We’ll look at the core 7 types of waste Toyota see within processes and production systems and consider the claims for the addition of an eighth.

Processes are a lot more interesting than you’d first think. That isn’t some kind of joke — they’re interesting, I swear. But what is a process?

Although they’re defined as “a collection of interrelated work tasks initiated in response to an event that achieves a specific result”, there’s a bit of a backstory that helps us cut through the corporate tranquilizers and understand what a process is, and why processes matter.

First, a few examples of processes:

• Cleaning the store
• Finding an email address
• Deploying software
• Customer profiling
• Onboarding a new employee
• Planning a wedding

But why are those processes? Why aren’t they just jobs to be done? The point is that when you formalize a process, you think about the workflow with productivity in mind and it makes it easier to execute and optimize.

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If you’ve been looking at ways to make your content delivery processes more efficient, you’re not alone.

There are tons of articles on content creation, even more on creative processes, but hardly any articles focused on improving content processes.

This article is all about addressing that imbalance, and getting your content systems coordinated to improve your team’s content efficiency, quality, and delivery. 

By the end, we want to share the exact process we used to:

• Drop our delivery time for content upload by 50%
• Increase our team productivity by 35%
• Improve client satisfaction by 20%
• Enlarge work capacity by 15%

It’s one thing to tinker around the edges, making small improvements here and there. It’s another to re-think and radically change the way you deliver your content. Developing your small business mindset and continuously evaluating your processes are the key to improving your overall content marketing efforts this year.

This article will walk you through every step we took to do that using Process Street’s automated workflows.

• Rethink your delivery process: Give your content marketing a workout
• Content marketing delivery: How we broke the system
• The right tool for the job: How do I get my processes in line?
• How did this one process impact our productivity?
• The future is processes: Cut out distractions and do what you love

Let’s get to it!

69% of Millennials would rather make $50k a year at a job they love than $75k a year in a boring job.

On top of that, the cost to the US economy of a disengaged, dissatisfied employee can be up to $500 billion a year.

So how do you make sure that you provide a role that both addresses the needs of your employee and aligns with company goals?

The answer? Adopting these HR best practices.

At Process Street, we recognize the delicate balance between your business and your employees that’s maintained primarily by your HR department. The best practices in this post will ensure that balance stays in place.

You don’t have to take just our word for it, though. We’ll also look at how Adobe, Google, Accenture, and Salesforce implement them in their own companies.

In this article, we will discuss the following:

• The benefits of HR best practices
• Implementing your HR best practices
• HR best practice maintenance for the long-term

Ready to get started?
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Creating workflows with Process Street is as quick and easy as 1-2-3. To prove it here are five tips to help you create your first workflow:

• Pages: The peanut butter to your workflows
• Pick a simple, repeatable workflow
• Complete your task list first
• Use form fields to capture information
• Assign your team members
• Connect your favorite apps in one place

Let’s get started!
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No process is perfect; there’s always room to improve. Unfortunately, many teams have no way to identify, test, and deploy the changes they make, meaning each tweak is a roll of the dice.

The savings can be massive, but you need a continuous improvement program to make sure that the changes you make won’t make your operations a whole lot harder.

“1 in 10 improvements save money… [each saving, on average,] $31,043 in its first year of implementation.
1 in 4 improvements save time… [each saving, on average,] 270 hours in its first year of implementation.”
– KaiNexus, The ROI of Continuous Improvement

Most successful changes will also make your employees’ jobs easier (and more enjoyable) to perform. You’ll be saving time and money, but you’ll also be getting far better value out of your current efforts and operations.

However, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start from the top.

• What is continuous improvement?
• Incremental vs. breakthrough improvements
• The benefits of continuous improvement
• How to deploy continuous improvement
• Improvement resources to dive deeper

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This article is based on a segment from Process Street‘s Highway 2021 virtual event, where Anne Perry, Process Street’s resident process design expert, shares with us how we’ve built processes for hundreds of teams to help make work fun, fast, and faultless.

Process Design Masterclass: What I’ve Learned Building Processes for Hundreds of Teams was the eighth segment in Process Street’s Highway event.

You can check out our playlist of the full Highway event here, and don’t forget to sign up for free with Process Street!

Here’s the Process Design Masterclass with Anne Perry segment in full:

• Anne Perry: Process Street’s resident process design expert
• Four Ws and an H
• Why: Why does this workflow exist?
• What: What needs to be done?
• How: How do I do it?
• Who: Who does what?
• When: When are things supposed to be done?

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