Most of us will admit that we’re guilty of wasting time at work every once in a while. Whether it’s checking personal emails, having a sneaky peak at our Facebook page or prolonging a tea-making session to have a gossip with colleagues, a staggering 89% of us admit to wasting time in the office.
Although there are some glaringly obvious ways of wasting the day away, there are a number of things that many businesses do every day without realising is a complete waste of time and resources. Are you guilty of any of the below?
Meetings
Frequent and prolonged meetings are without a doubt one of the biggest drains on small business efficiency. How many times do you find yourself in back-to-back meetings or find that even a one hour meeting ends up taking over your whole day because of travelling and the preparation involved?
Although meetings can be essential, there are many things you can do to prevent them from becoming counter-productive. Start by having an agenda – a set time the meeting starts, a set time it will finish and a clear outline of what will be discussed and what the objectives are.
Try not to involve too many people because this is often why meetings end up turning into a day-long event. If it involves clients, customers or employees from other sites, think about whether it would be more time-effective to have a video or phone conference.
IT Issues
How often does your business face down-time thanks to a computer or Internet related issue? Unfortunately, no matter what you do, from time to time this is going to happen. However, there are a number of things you can do to reduce the frequency of this happening and the amount of time you are affected for.
A lot of companies swear by Macs because they are easy to set up and require little, if any, external support. Cloud computing can also help to make your business run more efficiently because something like Google Docs for example makes it very easy for your whole team to work on the same document. Business accounts can be handled by a range of competitively priced cloud services while Dropbox is great for saving time and hard disk space when storing and sharing large files.
Whether you’re a business owner, manager or employee, we all know that paperwork can take up hours of our day. Although all these admin tasks are a necessary evil, you can help to make life a lot easier for yourself.
Consider using a document management tool to help you catalogue and search the items you need to file. Make sure that you have a system in place and that everybody sticks to it. If everyone is using their own method it becomes complicated and time consuming. Finally, if your business really does deal with an abundance of paperwork, consider employing someone to handle this to free up some of your time.
Do you have any helpful time-saving tips? Feel free to share them with our readers below.
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