If you want to increase your productivity, sometimes all it takes is a little networking and collaboration. There will be times when it makes sense to bring someone else to the table who has a different skill or is better qualified to do something than you are.
This can be a mutually beneficial arrangement if you choose to work with colleagues who can help improve your productivity, rather than damage it. However, choosing the correct partner is an important part of the decision.
If you choose someone who is difficult to work with, because their personality doesn’t mesh well with your own, it can hold you back rather than allow you to achieve more in your business.
A collaboration doesn’t always mean that you are firmly partnered up with someone. This can be a separate type of collaboration where you are each working on your own projects, but simply leveraging each others expertise without being paired up.
For example, you may have a good friend in the marketing industry who has knowledge that you are lacking. If you can barter with some sort of skill or insight of your own, you can help each other out without having a formal partnership.
But there are times when you may be approached by someone else, or you approach someone else to officially partner up for the launch of a product, service or membership site. If you go this route, you have to set the parameters of the collaboration clearly ahead of time.
You need to have a discussion about what your expectations are and what responsibilities each person has within the partnership. Make sure you are on the same page when it comes to communicating with one another, and that includes what type of communication you will be using as well as the frequency of it.
You may have one person in the partnership who likes to work during the wee morning hours and talk on the phone, while the other person gets up at 5:00 o’clock in the morning and prefers email.
There are many tools that you can use online these days where you can each log in to a project management system and see where everyone else is at in terms of progress with the tasks and to share information with one another.
Make sure you each have the same goals in mind and that you are regularly meeting with one another to check in and discuss the progress and direction of the project. Sometimes it’s better to start with a small collaboration to make sure that the two of you are a good fit before you move on to something bigger or more long-term.
In the next email in this series I’m going to discuss introducing automation into your business and how it can increase your productivity.
Until next time,