Is your business as efficient as it could be? Unfortunately, companies throughout the nation waste millions of hours every year that could be put to better use. In many instances, small changes to the way you approach your business and your working life could lead to huge increases in productivity and transform the fortunes of your company. Below are some simple, yet effective ways to waste less time in your business.
Tools and Automation
Thanks to the latest technologies, almost every task can be automated instead of having to do it manually. This automation frees you and your employees up to do more productive tasks, rather than having to continually complete repetitive activities. For example, the latest speech recognition systems allow you to turn words into text quickly. These video transcribing app and systems have the potential to dramatically cut down on the amount of time you spend writing and preparing work related documents.
Planning and Scheduling Your Tasks
If you don’t set out plans for your business, it’s very difficult to manage your time properly. Ideally, you should create daily, weekly, monthly and yearly plans that keep you on track and help you avoid any distractions along the way. Once a plan has been put in place, you should stick to it as closely as possible. Changes to your circumstances will occur, so you also have to be willing to adjust your plans at certain stages.
As part of the planning process, you should consider creating checklists and choose a specific time and date to start and finish each task on these checklists. Doing this gives you a target to reach and it will motivate you and others to complete these tasks within the deadlines set out in your plan.
Build a Reliable, Efficient Team
The longer your employees have worked with you, the more effective they should be at completing their work. However, if you have a high turnover of staff, you have no consistency and this can affect the quality of the work new employees complete and the speed at which they work.
When you have high quality, reliable full time, part-time and freelancer workers, it’s vital to treat and reward them properly. The longer they stay and remain part of a team that performs well, the less time you will have to spend recruiting, training and wasting time re-doing poorly completed work.
Mobile Apps
The mobile revolution has changed all aspects of our lives, including the way we work. A wide range of productivity and business apps are now available that are designed to make business owners more efficient, make it easier to work from any location and make it easy to react to any situation immediately. Online and cloud based systems can also be accessed through your mobile device, which speeds up many workplace processes and tasks.
Avoid Common Workplace Distractions
The latest technologies have many benefits, but there is also a downside to having the latest devices and technologies in your business. Email, social media and smartphones can become huge distractions and it’s quite common for people to check for messages and interact with other people for too long during the day. Interacting with other work colleagues too much during the day is another distraction that has the potential to waste a large portion of your working day and your employees time.
To prevent these distractions, you need to become more disciplined. Choose specific times of the day to check your messages or hire someone to take care of this aspect of your business for you. Interacting with fellow workers is not a bad thing, but you should allocate specific times when it’s acceptable to do so, especially during work hours.
Be Accountable to Someone Else
Even if you are the leading figure in your organization, you should try to find someone else that you can be accountable to. For instance, if you find an accountability partner you could tell them what your plans and targets are each week, and vice-versa. At the end of each week you could meet up in person, speak on the phone or communicate over the internet and report back to that person about what you have achieved during the week and they can do the same thing.
Optimizing the time you and your employees spend in your business is crucial. It will ensure that you and your business achieve more. It’s not always easy to achieve this important goal, but implementing the tips above will go a long way towards reducing the amount of time that is wasted in your company.
Founder Dinis Guarda
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