Save time when you’re using digital tools

Whether you’re a solopreneur or an organisation, there’s nothing more infuriating than spending needless time on your digital tools, like copying and pasting data.

Or, emailing back and forth trying to agree on a time to meet.

Or, fixing the same error over and over

Or, manually updating systems that should be automatic

Or, receiving hundreds of emails when you could probably do that work in another, better way.

Or...

I think you get the idea. There are so many ways to waste time with digital tools. Shall we recover some of that time?

First off, from my experience optimising my own workflows, it’s very easy to dive in too quick and create magnificent solutions to problems I don’t have. So, take a deep breath. Breath out and start by focussing on the problems first.

Here’s some questions to prime yourself to focus on the problems and not the solutions (without the need for an expert):

• Where are your most common pain points?

  • If a spreadsheet isn’t too intimidating, start tracking and categorising your pain points this will help you to see patterns and if you engage an expert later, they’ll love you for it!

  • Why does each one keep happening?

  • What’s the root cause for that pain point? You could use the Five Why’s framework with your team (if you have one, otherwise get a friend to ask you the why question), to make sure you’re getting down to the root cause and not getting sidetracked by a superficial answer.

• Are any of these pain points repeating multiple times, over a regular period?

• Are the workflows you’re calling “ad-hoc” really ad hoc? Or are you missing a regular pattern that could be optimised instead of dealing uniquely with every time?

• Are you making enough space in your week to ask yourself these questions?

• Are you experimenting with little tweaks that’ll save your time?

• Do you have someone to keep you accountable to recovering your time?

• Are you reinvesting that saved time in improving even more?

Once you’ve collected some data and are getting a clearer picture where you’re spending the most time, here’s a few solutions to get your brain humming on some of the common area’s to start with:

• Do you regularly send the same email?

  • Create a template in your inbox

  • Automatically send an email if there’s a particular action that predictably happens

  • Redirect answers to your emails to a helpdesk app so someone else in the team can answer it, or you can hire a virtual admin.

  • Get people to fill out an online form and automatically send the answers to the right systems.

  • Get savvier with customers purchasing or filling out forms on your website, send responses automatically, send followups automatically.

• Do you regularly have similar email conversations?

  • Setup a Calendly account with regular meeting types and polls

    • Make sure your calendar is actually up-to-date and that you keep it updated regularly

  • Store the answers to commonly asked questions from your team or customers in a wiki, does your brain really need to store your organisations tax number, physical address, common links...?

  • Consolidate all those different sources of information from various systems in to that one wiki with some embedded tables (even if you work on your own, a one stop, info shop can save you a lot of time trying to track down that dratted document which you now can’t remember the name of!)

  • Move your email discussions to an online space where you can discuss things in real time and thread conversations rather than have one overwhelming email back and forth.

  • Setup a personal or team task manager and keep updates in that context.

  • In a team, make sure people are assigning themselves to those tasks and setting due dates so the task doesn’t sit untended.

  • Setup a rhythm for checking in on the tasks. This is a chance for people to update how they’re progressing towards their due dates and can ask for help / agree on a new date. (Ideally people are only assigned to a limited amount of tasks at a time otherwise the task manager quickly becomes wallpaper.)

• Do you struggle to find information?

  • As mentioned above, create a one-stop info-shop so you know where to search/browse to find something.

  • Create a spreadsheet - sometimes it IS good to create another document. In this case, if you’re finally centralising a bunch of related data in to one place, a spreadsheet can be a helpful place to start.

    • Add a status column, some date columns and some categories so that you can filter and sort it.

    • Start capturing all that info you’ve meant to but never got around to. When your spreadsheet starts getting unwieldy, you know it’s time to get an expert in to help you build a proper database.

  • Setup a CRM. If one person is doing sales / relationship building in your org, having one seat on Pipedrive is quite cheap and the interface is very nice to work with. One of the key reasons to have a CRM is because it allows you to relatively simply keep track of all your interactions with leads/clients in a way that a spreadsheet isn’t really cut out for.

Malcolm