By Catherine Jones bio
We’re all strapped for time and usually the first activities sacrificed are those which are personally important to us. For example, according to DOMO,
- 42% of college graduates have never read another book after college
- 67% of parents say they don’t have enough time to spend with their children
- 60% of employees feel they don’t have enough time for a hobby for themselves
- Only 35% of American workers take an actual lunch break
Think about how much time you or your staff members waste every week hunting down information. What would you do if you could spend that time doing something else? Just imagine what you could accomplish! This infographic from DOMO shows what some Americans say they would do with an extra two hours a day.
But how do you reclaim those two extra hours? Here are a few ways you could save time at the office:
1. Automate your document creation process
“On average our customers who implement document automation technology as a part of their everyday work practice save 72 percent of the time they would otherwise spend on the manual creation of repetitive documents,” says Bob Christensen, CEO of TheFormTool, LLC. [See How document automation can save you thousands.]
2. Pursue a paperless office
Some studies suggest that 10 percent of staff’s time is wasted looking for misfiled paper. Joe Kashi, a trial lawyer in Alaska, believes that by imaging documents, he’s cut down on that productivity killer by at least 75 percent.
“With paper, you can’t find a document that’s been misfiled,” says Kashi. “But if you run the OCR [optical character recognition] function in Acrobat Standard or Professional, the entire contents of each document will be directly searchable, enabling you to find that vaguely remembered material.” [See Buried by paper: Time to crawl out and go digital.]
3. Organize your desk
Where do you spend 1920 hours of the year? Well, if you work in an office, that’s approximately how much time you spend at your desk. But is it time well spent?
The Dublin Office Centre has put together a great infographic on a few small changes you can make to your workspace to ensure that those 1920 hours are productive ones. [See How to organize your desk to improve your productivity.]
4. Improve ergonomics
Once your desk is organized, take a look at how your entire workspace is assembled. When work areas are in sync with the people spending their days in them, there’s no time lost to sick days and no money lost to low productivity, says Hayley Kaye, a certified professional ergonomist with HLK Consulting in New York City. [See Better productivity and a happier staff happen as ergonomics steps in.]
5. Upgrade your collections processes
If you aren’t already accepting credit card payments, look into this today. Swiping a debit or credit card often involves less immediate work for your staff than accepting and depositing a check or cash. And once you’re accepting credit card payments, add a “pay online” page to your website. When emailing your invoices to clients, include a link in the email to your online payment page. This combination will likely lead clients to pay even faster, meaning you don’t have to waste as much time chasing down overdue accounts. [See San Diego firm gets more cash faster with easy-to-use online credit card payment system.]
6. Preempt time-wasting questions
Design your office manual to answer new staffer’s and attorney’s FAQs. According to one Georgia administrator, having the business information in writing means newcomers don’t interrupt other people or waste their own time asking about day-to-day things
But her office manual goes beyond the basics. It’s a “how-to” for the entire office. For example, it not only outlines the firm’s organization and the basic duties of the individual attorneys and staff, it also provides directions to the office, which is helpful when clients call needing directions. And for inside the office, there are directions for where supplies are located and the names of suppliers.
After that, the manual goes into details of getting the job done. There is a section on the record management system and how to open and close files, and another covering the word processing department, outlining the type of work that can be submitted and how to submit it.
Drawing up the manual was a considerable investment of time, says the administrator. It is 80 pages long and took about 11 months to complete. But that time has been recouped by the amount of time it saves in training newcomers. [See Georgia manager develops “how-to” manual that makes employee orientation easy.]
What time-savers have you implemented in your office that are meeting or exceeding your expectations? Send your story to me at catherine@plainlanguagemedia.com. If we publish your ideas in the newsletter, we’ll pay you $100.
