Five tips on how to be more productive

Striving to cram as much as you can into each working day? Hannah Smith of business insurance experts Simply Business, has five tips on how you can work smartly and effectively.

The trouble is that there's so much out there on the subject - articles, videos, tools, books; it can be hard to figure out where to start. Who has the time to work through all of this in order to figure out how to become more productive?

Fortunately Simply Business have done some of the leg work for you with their Productivity Series. They've created resources to help improve productivity in the following five key areas:

1) Collaboration

Here the focus is on increasing communication and collaboration between individuals and teams. Covers solutions to challenges like managing teams remotely, project management and garnering feedback.

2) Travel

The focus is on tools and tactics to make the best use of your time when you're on the road.

3) Email

Often a productivity killer, the focus is on keeping on top of your inbox without hindering your workflow.

4) Meetings

Tips and tools to keep your meetings short, on-track and productive.

5) Workload

With everything else you have to do, your own personal deadlines can often get de-railed. This guide covers how to hit deadlines, delegation, planning and dealing with distractions.

Click on the image below to get started. Move through each of the questions - if you see an issue you can relate to, move to the outer circles which contain links. Simply click on whatever takes your fancy and the resource will open in a new tab.

You can view other graphics in the series by clicking on PREVIOUS or NEXT.

In addition to this Simply Business have also interviewed several prominent business owners about their productivity challenges and the tools and tactics they've used to overcome them.

Their top tips include:

"Determine your primary focus and value-add; then outsource, hire for or simplify/remove everything you don't do well. Also, try to keep all your tasks and communication in a single source (email's been fantastic for that for me, and enables dramatically more productivity, IMO, than when I see folks who have lots of different ways to-do items in their personal/professional life can come in)." - Rand Fishkin, www.seomoz.org

"Kill your interruptions. Structure your day so that you have time to focus on one task for an extended period." - Jared Goralnick, www.awayfind.com

"Let go and have faith in the people you hired to get things done. You can't do it all yourself and if you try you will burn out." - www.zemanta.com

"Cut meetings down to a bare minimum. Give your employees way more respect and responsibility so they can do their work well. Ruthlessly cut out tasks and projects that aren't high-value." - Corbett Barr, http://insanelyusefulmedia.com/

Click here to check out the interviews in full.