1. Clean out your inbox!
Grow Smarter And Faster By Automating Tedious Work Tasks: You might as well start with the bane of your professional life: your inbox! The emails keep coming, and God forbid, because when you get back, you’ll have to spend a whole day going through that backlog! The average employee receives 121 communications a day and then sends 40, so how can automation help?
Most email platforms, such as Gmail and Outlook, have built-in automation tools allowing you to sort emails by importance quickly. Smart tags in Gmail or rules in Outlook will enable you to automatically sort your incoming emails based on sender details or keywords. Both email platforms allow you to schedule email delivery at a specific time. You can do this in Outlook by clicking the More options arrow in your email’s “Labels” section or using the Boomerang plugin for Gmail. You can also design email templates for messages you repeatedly send to save time and avoid mistakes.
2. Start using text-to-speech software
Sometimes the simplest pieces of technology can save the most time on the job. No one marvels at the wonders of a calculator more, but it’s one of the most practical pieces of office equipment! It’s the automation we need in other areas of our working lives, a solution that gets a task done quickly and accurately every time. Text-to-speech software is just that. Dictation solutions have come a long way in recent years, and for anyone who writes a lot daily, this is a must! If you’re looking for a free version, GoogleDocs Voice Typing is a great option.
3. Be an automation genius with Zapier or IFTTT
If you’re serious about automating tasks at work, you’ve probably heard of IFTTT and Zapier. Both apps allow you to sync multiple solutions so that your Gmail account can communicate with your Dropbox account or your Twitter trigger messages in your favorite Slack channel. These platforms allow you to design rules that, in practice, look like this: if X happens, then Y must happen.
X could be your company name tagged on Twitter, and Y could be that notification in a Slack channel. This would be very useful for the marketing department, but there are helpful rule combinations for everyone in the office. If you’re unsure what to automate, that’s no problem – look at their library of pre-made rules and see what’s popular with other users.
4. Get accurate financial information with Xero or Bullet
Human error is inevitable, but you don’t want it to happen in your financial accounts. Accounting solutions like Xero and Bullet (an Irish company) can help you automate repetitive tasks while providing business intelligence that would otherwise be lost! They allow you to automate payroll, invoicing, expense reports, approval processes, payments, and reports. If your bank allows live streaming, reconciliation becomes a breeze.
Which of these is right for you will depend on your needs, but both have time-saving features that the overworked entrepreneur will appreciate. Bullet, for example, performs automatic mileage calculations and can post revenue returns directly to ROS. Xero is mighty for growing startups because of the hundreds of other systems it can connect to inventory control, point of sale, project management, reservations, time tracking, CRM, and other business tools. They are cloud accounting solutions, meaning everything is securely backed up and encrypted in the cloud, so you always have access to what you need when needed.
5. Automation of customer relationship management
Customer relationship management (CRM) software is a faultless resource for companies with many customers to manage and want to design an effective sales pipeline tailored to each individual. With CRM tools, you can automate many different aspects of your company’s communication with your customers, such as the initial “Welcome” email, follow-up emails, automatic reminders that a subscription expires