At work, wasted time and inefficient processes have a significant impact on your bottom-line performance. Though it may only be a few minutes here or there, small time-wasting habits can add up quickly and keep you from being as efficient and profitable as you could be.
Fortunately, there are many ways to improve your efficiency, thanks to productivity hacks and automated tools to enhance workflow. Here are our top tips:
1. Focus on One Task at a Time
Bouncing back and forth between tasks on your to-do list can add up to a lot of wasted time. To combat this, schedule time every day to focus on each type of task you need to complete and work on one project before moving onto the next. For example, you may want to work on responding to all your emails at one time, rather than dividing them up over the course of the day.
2. Prioritize Your Work
When you’re scheduling your tasks for the day, it’s helpful to mark the highest priority tasks to ensure that you accomplish the most important work on your to-do list first. This way, the work with the highest impact will be out of the way earlier, and you can devote your full attention to the rest of your work.
3. Schedule One Day for Overflow
When you’re dealing with a long list of tasks, it can be easy to get behind and have work spill over into another day. If this happens enough, it can be difficult to get caught up and cause you to end up even further behind. Because of this, it’s important to have an open day to catch up on any important tasks without dividing your attention or dealing with interruptions.
4. Ditch Smartphone Notifications
While it may not be practical to turn your smartphone off completely, you can eliminate unnecessary distractions by disabling certain smartphone notifications. Social media accounts, personal email, app updates, and other notifications have no impact on your workday, so turning them off allows you to focus fully on your work and avoid missing any critical communications.
5. Set Goals
Defining your goals will keep you motivated to stay focused and productive. Try to keep your goals realistic — but ambitious — to ensure that you’re accomplishing everything that you can during your workday.
6. Prioritize Meetings
Meetings and communication within your business are important for your team members and goals, but they can lead to a lot of wasted time discussing non-business-critical information. If possible, schedule meetings with 25 percent less time than you think you need, which will force you and your team to focus on crucial information. You can also eliminate meetings for information that could be communicated in memos to your staff.
7. Delegate
While most business owners prefer to do all the work themselves, it can quickly lead to an overload. Learn which tasks truly require your input and which can be handled by properly skilled professionals so that you can focus on the tasks that only you can accomplish.
8. Learn to Say “No”
It may feel good to say “yes” to everything asked of you, but that can leave you overwhelmed and overloaded. If you can’t take on any more work, don’t be afraid to say “no” in a respectful way so that you can focus on perfecting the work you already have.
9. Use Templates
If you’re creating the same documents over and over, you’re wasting a lot of time that could be focused on other projects. Downloadable templates for your most commonly used formats and content can help you streamline your work and keep it consistent and high-quality.
10. Use Lead-Tracking Software
Nurturing and following up with leads is vital to making sales, but it can eat up a lot of your workday. With lead-tracking software, you can send automated emails to new leads and ensure that your follow-up is timely and appropriate.
11. Automate Your Calendar
Staying productive can be difficult with a busy schedule. Automated calendars streamline your schedule and make it easier to keep up with your deadlines and ensure you’re staying on track with your goals and tasks.
12. Use Automatic Email Responses
Responding to emails is a time-consuming and tedious task, especially if you’re sending a lot of similar email responses. Email templates with an automated system can save you time by sending responses to regular emails you receive.
13. Automate Invoicing
Sending invoices and chasing unpaid invoices redirects your time and attention from your workload. Automated invoices and reminders can help you manage your payments and make sure that your unpaid invoices are addressed.
14. Schedule Social Media Posts
Staying active on social media is vital to your brand awareness, so it’s important to post regularly and often. Social media calendars help you schedule your content and ensure that you don’t forget to post when you’re busy, so you’re always consistent and active on your social media accounts.
15. Optimize Customer Support
Customer support and service requires a lot of time and resources to maintain properly. Analytics software can be used to automate the customer service process and address common customer concerns, questions, and complaints so that your customer service representatives are free to handle more complex or in-depth problems.
16. Learn to Create and Use Visualizations
Business intelligence software usually comes with advanced features like graphs, tables, and other types of visualizations that help you organize and visualize data within minutes to glean important insights. If you’re unfamiliar with or intimidated by this software, schedule some time to learn the system and become comfortable with the advanced features. This will not only save you valuable time with data analytics, but it will also make it easier to communicate your findings to other teams, leaders, or stakeholders.
17. Maximize Workflow With Izenda
Staying organized and productive at work can be a challenge, but it’s critical to the success of your business. These simple, effective productivity hacks will ensure you develop good work habits for the future and accomplish more over the course of your day.
Fortunately, business intelligence software can help you eliminate a lot of wasted time so you can focus on your core processes. With Izenda’s business intelligence software, you can deliver top-tier reporting and analytics to your users, departments, and teams without devoting a lot of time or resources. Contact us to learn more and request your demo!
