Time is priceless. If your days are like ours, there’s never enough time in the day. From the million little things to the big projects that go on for weeks, each of them occupies a slice of your precious time.
We have gone to great lengths to ensure that anywhere we can bank time in the day, we take advantage of those opportunities.
You can find time in all kinds of places – for example are you still looking up passwords that you use for different websites, and different devices in a document of some kind? Maybe it’s Excel, or Word, or simply a text file, but it takes you time to open up that file, get the appropriate password and copy and paste it into the site. Utilizing a password manager, that works on your phone, tablet, desktop (in any browser that you use) will save you a minute each time you use it. Just go to the webpage, and it logins automatically. You just bought yourself a minute each time you would have otherwise started the password hunt.
What other processes do you “have” to do? For us, one included everything related to starting a new job with a client, whether it was for a small print ad, or a web platform development project. We had to assign a number to the job in our accounting system, utilize that number in the project management tasks for the project, and create folders on our server with the structure that we’ve developed over a decade which keeps us the most organized. All of these small tasks put together took up an employee’s valuable time. A year later we couldn’t imagine not going to the web app we developed, selecting a few things from a short form, and hitting submit to let the application handle all of the tedious tasks. Sure, it cost us time / money to develop the web app, but compared to the time savings we gain by having it, it’s invaluable.
We’ve done this for countless companies as well. Whether it is an HTML email signature creator, or integrating ERP applications with Ecommerce sites to transfer inventory, shipping and purchase info, or a bill paying portal that allows customers to quickly pay their outstanding bills rather than calling you. Sometimes it takes an outside brain thinking about your business processes to even see where those opportunities may exist.
We all know that we do tedious tasks during the day, and maybe we don’t even know how they could be streamlined or automated. For a fun task, bore one of your friends or significant other with some of the things you do every day and see what they say. You may find that they ask “why do you have to do that?”. If you or someone at your company can’t answer that question, that may not be something you “have” to do. Don’t make the mistake of doing things just because that’s how they have always been done, if there isn’t a good reason to do them the same way – add that time to the bank!
How much time each day do you or your employees spend on answering customer questions, either by email, or phone? Utilizing an online Frequently asked questions system, can eliminate those phone calls or emails before they occur, leaving your time for closing sales, or developing your product, or wherever else your true skills apply. This isn’t to say that great customer service isn’t important – it is key. The more avenues you can make available to help a customer, or potential customer find answers and solve their problems, the more time you will save THEM, and yourself. Everybody wins.
What will you do with all this new time you have banked at the end of the day? That one’s up to you – but we might be able to help with that too. Cornhole anyone?