The startup life can seem glamorous and exciting at times, with the freedom to shape your destiny and so many opportunities to be creative, but it’s also incredibly hard work. After all, you’re trying to build something from scratch, and battling against many obstacles while making tough decisions. What can you spend? Whom should you hire? How should you operate?

It’s so tough, in fact, that many startups don’t last long before they fold entirely. That was true before the COVID-19 pandemic, and things haven’t become easier with conventional office life still non-viable in countless areas. Circumstances are challenging and time and money are greatly limited. To succeed, you need to pull out all the stops to maximize productivity.

In this post, we’re going to look at some essential productivity hacks that are perfect for new startups trying to get their operations established and stable. Let’s get started, shall we?

Prioritizing comprehensive website optimization

In this era of online business, the humble business website is perhaps the most important tool in a startup’s toolbox. It serves as the hub of all online operations, inevitably tasked with fielding queries, establishing connections, and converting interest. Productivity fundamentally concerns getting useful things done, and each of those responsibilities is extremely useful. That any given step needn’t require manual effort in the moment is a positive, not a negative.  So it’s better to hire a dedicated software development team to have your website done professionally.

Accordingly, the smartest thing a startup can do is invest heavily in its website, aiming to make it as good as it can possibly be given the available resources. This polished website will then work in the background to the startup’s advantage: making it look good to prospective customers or investors, demonstrating industry expertise, and ranking well for relevant terms. This will need to be met with comprehensive content marketing and link-building efforts, of course, since website quality is not inherently sufficient — but it’s an excellent first step.

Centralizing file storage and task management

Remote working is now the standard, and that’s unlikely to change in the coming years, even assuming we’re eventually able to defuse the COVID-19 situation. It’s relatively safe, cheap, and convenient, with many of the drawbacks steadily being addressed. One such drawback is the lack of in-person contact making communication tough — and if you’re going to handle that, you need to implement centralization in a sensible way.

All the files that your employees work on should be stored and shared in the cloud so all the necessary people can access and update them when needed. Whether it’s Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive, even a straightforward file-gathering service can work perfectly well. And you should do the same thing for your tasks. Task management software can line everything up and clarify responsibility so key actions don’t get overlooked (some tools, like Get Busy, have highly-effective systems for deploying automated reminders so you never miss an important task).

Keeping outsourcing as a useful option

The spirit of doing things yourself is a precious thing for startups, and should be retained for as long as possible — but it doesn’t mean doing everything yourself, because attempting to take sole ownership of every last task is a recipe for disaster. Instead of obsessively keeping things in-house, you should have a pipeline set up for outsourcing certain tasks.

Take something ostensibly simple like graphic design. For a professional graphic designer, a logo created to suit specific guidelines is a fairly simple job that can be achieved to suit an outline timescale — but for an amateur designer with middling skills, it can easily turn into an extended exercise in frustration. With websites like Fiverr and Upwork making it trivial to find and vet freelancers, it makes all the sense in the world to use them when convenient.

Concentrating on achievable short-term goals

One of the biggest mistakes a new startup can make is setting long-term goals and failing to turn them into realistic steps. An objective like tripling the size of the business is great, but it’s a binary measure: either you’ve made it or you haven’t. Even if you break it down into doubling the business first, how are you actually going to make that happen? What can you do?

The more time you spend sitting around trying to figure that out, the more time you’re wasting without being productive. By first putting some time into a plan that concentrates on meaningful metrics that you can plausibly shape through your actions, you can ensure that you always know where your attention is most warranted.