Glad to have Hurricane Dorian behind us.
This newsletter offers some thoughts on Workflow and Automation.
We all face tasks the are recurring or repetitive. Give some thoughts on how to handle your work more efficiently in the future by delegation. It doesn’t have to be to another person but “delegate” to an application or using a form… read template. If you can take five minutes off a task you do every workday, then you can save 100 minutes a month. That’s an hour and forty minutes or 20 hours a year! Almost a whole day for free!. So you can see that even small savings add up over a month and especially a year.
You might think, where can I look?
- Communications – emails
- Content creation – social media
- Marketing – ads and brochures
- Administration – filing, handling of documents, expense reports, and so on
Some examples: for email you can use Gmail to create templates, Gmail calls it “canned responses”. You can have a number of responses to inquires that are sent out quickly to clients/prospects. On a Mac and PCs you can use a “text expander” to automatically insert text (a sentence or even whole paragraphs) with just a few keystrokes (that saves time and prevents typos). You create your own library of inserts.
If you use a set of documents over and over, set them up as templates in Evernote so that you can duplicate them and then fill them out as needed for each new project. Folders can contain subfolders, pictures, audio files, PDFs etc. Just copy/duplicate the main folder, rename it and speed on ahead.
When you downloaded Evernote, a small elephant head should be on your menu bar (on Macs). When you get that million dollar idea, or need to remind yourself of something but don’t want to write it down and then loose it, just click on the elephant head and type what needs attention. Click “save to Evernote”, and it will go right into your Evernote InBox! How easy is that.
There are a number of third-party tools available for Evernote. See https://appcenter.evernote.com Check them out, the can be very useful and save you time. There are also automation apps such as Hazel and Alfred that are very powerful and can be used for multi-step work.
Speaking of templates, the one attached below is for Evernote. You can easily create your own or search the Evernote Template Library and grab one for free. Modify it as needed to personalize it. The one below was useful to me as we all need to pause sometimes and make sure our compass heading needs some adjustment. Starting from the bottom and then working up helps us to focus on goals and our personal or business mission.
Just add your list in AREAS FOR IMPROVEMENT and then bullet points of tasks in NEXT ACTIONS. This can be our rudder to help steer the shortest course to our destination. The template is from Carl Pullein. He has many, many videos on YouTube about workflows and using Evernote and other applications as well as time management and other business topics. Most are 10 to 15 minutes.
Need I say to always make sure your backups are in place and working and be sure to keep your anti-viral and malware apps up to date. Keep your passwords strong and use a password manager to help you manage them.Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut elit tellus, luctus nec ullamcorper mattis, pulvinar dapibus leo.