Efficiency is the new cool kid on the block. With life being more hectic with every turn, there has to be a better way to deal with the overwhelm. Alexis Haselberger, founder of Alexis Haselberger Coaching and Consulting, can guide you in creating a more efficient life that will allow you to be more present in your everyday activities. Alexis realized a common thread with 20 plus years of experience working in a fast-paced start-up environment. The more efficient you become, the more time you create in your day. Today, Alexis fills her days coaching Fortune 500 companies, such as Google, Lyft, and Capital One, on how their teams can work more efficiently together to improve their bottom line. She shares all her tips with you today on the One Big Tip podcast.

Alexis Hasleberger is an efficiency coach that understands how difficult it can be to optimize your time and be present in all parts of your life. Having an efficiency-focused brain since she was a child, her goal was to get the most done in the least amount of time, with the least amount of effort, while providing excellent results. For the first 15 years of her career, Alexis worked in the San Francisco Bay area for different startups, where she managed everything but sales and engineering.  People started to take notice of her innate talent and began approaching her to coach or give workshops on efficiency and time management. When the last start-up she worked for closed its doors, Alexis decided to venture out on her own using her talent for efficiency and time management and created Alexis Haselberger Coaching and Consulting. 

The first step in productivity and efficiency is to create a to-do list. Does the question become which is better, digital time management or pen to paper? Alexis feels there is a place for both. Pen and paper are fantastic tools for jotting things down on the fly or during a call or meeting. But if you don’t input the information into a digital system, there is a lot of time spent writing and rewriting your list. Pen and paper lists also require you to store a lot of information in your head. This can weigh you down. Digital to-do lists have a lot of benefits. First, they are typically available on all your devices, so you can seamlessly transition from phone to laptop to iPad. Second, they can organize like tasks with like tasks and create deadlines with the click of a button. Although digital is the way to go for efficiency, people have to do what they are most comfortable with. 

Another tip for productivity and efficiency is realism. When you create your to-do lists, you need to work within your reality. Create a schedule based on the amount of time you have to dedicate to the work you have before you and not the amount of time you wish you had. This creates overwhelm, and you walk away without accomplishing anything. 

The most straightforward process to creating efficiency is creating tomorrow’s to-do list today at the end of your workday. The reason is twofold. First, it allows you to have a brain dump before leaving your desk, office, or workplace. This is important because it will enable you to walk away from the work portion of your life and be fully present in your personal life. This balance is challenging for people who work from home or are solopreneurs. It’s hard to create boundaries and transitions in either of those scenarios. The second reason this works as an efficiency tool as well as it does, is that it lets you start your day with a plan. There’s no thinking about how your day will look. You sit down, tackle that list and work your way through it. Of course, there’s constant tweaking and add-ons, but you know what you need to focus on for the most part. 

Another barrier people face is realizing that they don’t need to do everything themselves. People need to delegate a lot of their responsibility to others who can