You never get time back…
Missing out isn’t fun. Whether it is spending more time with family or friends, or having more time to work on growing your business, there never seems to be enough hours in the day. It can be easy to get dragged along by the latest distraction. Suddenly you wonder where the day has gone and there’s still so much to do. It can seem that this is the only way to be. Isn’t everyone else behaving the same way? Well, not everyone…
How to take back control
Time is precious and sometimes it helps to remind ourselves of that. This nice article from Lifehack lists seven tips for regaining control of your time. To paraphrase the article, the solution to regaining control of your time is to prioritise, and to prioritise regularly. Ask yourself at frequent intervals if what you are doing right now is the best way to be spending your time. I suppose that’s another discipline to learn.
What about the time you spend at work? The day can easily slip away unless you discipline yourself quite strictly. On top of that you also need efficient processes and the right tools to support those processes. Analysing your business and how tasks are performed requires you to take a step back from the day to day. When you are already pressed for time that might seem impossible. But, if you don’t change things, won’t you always get the same result? Perhaps you could make yourself a small window of opportunity by letting some people know in advance that you won’t be able to deliver something on time. People are usually OK with that if you can give them fair warning. If you let them know the reason for the delay is so you can improve your processes that won’t hurt either. With better processes you will be able to offer a better product to them in the future.
When you first start to analyse your business processes, it would be very useful to have an experienced business analyst on hand. They can help you evaluate tasks. Their knowledge of what business software can automate in the office will help you build a picture of how much time you could save. Think about how long it can take you to send out a week’s or a month’s worth of invoices. Or how about checking your inventory levels and sending purchase orders to your suppliers. Now imagine that you have a custom business system which takes care of all that for you. In the morning you open up your computer and it just informs you of progress. You didn’t need to lift a finger and all those time-wasting tasks have been done.
What have you got to lose, but time?
Here at Working Data we specialise in helping businesses make their first move from ‘paper and spreadsheets’ to a custom Access database. Microsoft Access is the world’s most popular desktop database and is a rapid development application. This allows us to quickly develop user-friendly and efficient business systems with low overheads here in the UK.
For a no-obligation chat about how a Microsoft Access database can help you free up more of your time, contact us.
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