When you run a small business you need to be as organised as possible, usually structuring your business operations around processes and procedures . I used to store most of these processes in my head but now I use the simplest productivity application after pen and paper, the flowchart.
So what is a flowchart really when you break it down? Quite literally it’s just charting the ‘flow’ of a variable number of processes/steps required to achieve a result of some sort… yes you can thank me later for that brilliant piece of analysis. Even if you aren’t a naturally visual person you can still adapt the concept of a flowcharts to help you become more productive – it doesn’t matter if you are drawing 
boxes and arrows or recording a number of steps in a spoken word format so long as you are thinking about the things you do in a more procedural, goal oriented way.
Flowcharts are fantastic productivity tools for a number of reasons but my personal favourite is just how simple they are to start using. Take any process or procedure that you perform and you can turn it into a flowchart in a matter of minutes.
- Write down each action or step required using no more than a few words – if it takes more than this you are probably describing more than one action so break it up.
- Draw a box around the action
- Repeat for every action
- Join each action together with arrows that follow the flow of actions from beginning to end.
Once you have your process mapped out in a flowchart you will always follow the same series of steps to achieve this result. This in turn means that you reinforce the steps until it eventually becomes what psychologists call an ‘automatic process’, meaning you don’t really think about it at all. Walking is an automatic process, as is eating or drinking or talking.
The more I follow my flowcharts the faster I get at performing the processes they map out, saving me time and thus making me more productive – it’s a beautifully viscous cycle.
Many of the flowcharts I have don’t even really achieve a result at all, they just help me visualise and structure tasks in a more accessible way. ‘Social media marketing’ or ‘Blog reading’ aren’t exactly outcomes or results I am trying to achieve but they both have a number of steps involved in them that I’ve found really useful to have displayed as a flowchart. I find that having visualisations to follow keeps me much more focused on the job at hand and help me manage my time much more effectively.
Do you use flowcharts and if so what do you use them for?
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