Shorten Your Workday

That kind of performance isn’t easy to deliver during a standard workday.

"My salespeople were frustrated that they couldn’t get to everybody they want to," says Hood, who sometimes worked 80 hours a week or more.

Companies like Market Crank don’t necessarily need more hours to accomplish their desired tasks, however. Many just need to improve their productivity.

According to an online Microsoft survey, average workers in the United States feel that up to 16 hours of their workweeks are unproductive. They spend more than five hours in meetings, and 71 percent say that meetings are unproductive.

According to Rich Townsend, a productivity consultant and vice president of Townsend Consulting Group of Marco Island, part of the problem is the distraction of constant communication. E-mails, text messages and phone calls, for instance, cut into time that might otherwise be spent on productive tasks. "You get scattered rather than doing the most leveraged, most important things that need to be done," Townsend says. "It’s dramatic."

He offers several tips to boost your output without adding more hours to your workday. First, Townsend says, managers and staff should create a master list of everything that has to get done. Start with items of a more immediate nature: submitting expense reports, attending meetings, returning phone calls. Then, add the tasks required for a company to move forward: contacting potential clients, purchasing inventory or equipment, hiring staff. Finally, carry a "capture tool"—a voice recorder, a PDA, a notepad—to keep track of new tasks and ideas, and add them to your list at the end of each day.