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How to Get more Done and See the Bigger Picture

How to Get more Done and See the Bigger Picture

Working in an office means lots of crazy days where you’re extremely busy and overwhelmed with super-urgent problems, but by the evening you realize you haven’t completed anything really noteworthy or important. Recent research into the attitude of employees towards deadlines has shown that the concept of urgency overshadows the concept of high impact. That is, most employees treat urgent tasks as more important than tasks with higher business value. This is bad news for companies because employees fail to understand which tasks are truly important, and which are not, and instead waste valuable time on…well, less important things.

We would all agree that it always feels good to complete a task, get an impending deadline out of the way and just forget about it. However, life teaches us that what’s most critical is hardly ever urgent. Education and professional development, writing a book, preparing an anti-crisis business strategy, charity—all these things require not weeks, but months or even years—and more often than not they have no deadlines at all.

Business leaders may spend years postponing the issue of automating key processes in their division simply because all their time is spent on the little urgent things, like making a presentation on quarterly achievements, writing an intro to a newsletter for clients, or sorting email.

Time management gurus have a lot to say on this issue, and their advice really works if you’re not afraid to follow it.

  1. Plan out your day the evening before or in the morning before you start working. Make your schedule down to the hour, and leave a little more time for every task than you expect it to take—this will stop you from rushing around, stressing out and thinking things like “I’m not getting anything done.”
  2. If you’ve been postponing an important task not directly related to your job, dedicate a whole day to it. Then every week, take a full day to handle large tasks until you finish them. For example, say that Tuesdays are for working on office renovation issues only—all 8 working hours. It’s likely you’ll get them done in less than a month.
  3. An advice as old as the hills: eat the elephant one bite at a time. Split your tasks to smaller subtasks until they no longer frighten you with their scale. Once you have started, you will be always ready to continue. By the way, there are a lot of situations when a half-done plan is more than enough.
  4. Try the quick decision-making strategy. When you’re in a rush, it’s better to solve issues quickly than perfectly.
  5. If there are any processes and situations related to the same issues and always requiring the same solution, use automation to save time. For example, the Workflowsoft business process management system can help you categorize, optimize, and delegate a vast number of routine workflows and create templates for repeat situations. Find the time to create a convenient workspace, and you’ll see just how much time you save yourself and your colleagues in the future. For example, invest time to develop agreement approval processes, organize business trips, order business cards, make technical support requests, create a one-stop shop for administrative department tasks, etc.

The more processes you automate, the more time you’ll have for what really matters. Just make sure not to burn out trying to squeeze everything you can out of every last second! You’ll get way more done if you work slowly but surely!

Read more:

What You Need to Know Before Drawing a Business Process Flow Diagram

A simple and effective method to help run your company is visualising your business processes.

Why is it Important to Have Efficient Processes?

No matter the type or scale of business you run, your success depends on the efficiency of your processes.

What are Business Process Solutions?

Business is a complicated world, and to be successful in it requires a wide range of skills and expertise. Given the fast-moving business landscape we now find ourselves in, this statement has never been more accurate.

What is a Workflow?

Every aspect of your business, from sales to production and shipping to customer follow up are workflows. All of these individual workflows combine to support your brand and create your company’s reputation in the marketplace.

Machines are Fairer than People

Research on the effectiveness of algorithmic decision-making has been being carried out for many years. And all of it comes to surprisingly similar conclusions: algorithms are less biased and more accurate than the people they replace.

Less Routine, Less Costs

Is there a way to quickly and painlessly reduce the business costs? Yes, there is — and it is called automation.

Automation. Order. Profit

When top managers assess corporate profitability, they compare two figures: production costs and gross revenue. But even profit growth does not always mean an enterprise is operating efficiently.

Workflowsoft Notifies

In any workflow management system (or in any collaboration system in general), participants need to receive notifications on events they’re involved in. The request assignee should be notified about the work they need to do, and the request creator should know when the request is complete.

Your company in Workflowsoft

Like in any other process management system, the first thing you need to do in Workflowsoft is create the users who will participate in processes. Of course, you can also create the entire organizational chart with all business units and their managers.

Healthy Atmosphere and Democratic Leadership

The task of a leader is to tailor motivation to the needs and talents of each and every talented employee, including both financial and non-financial incentives.

How Automation Affects your Employees: Three Important Facts

Being engaged in your job and gaining satisfaction from it are not directly linked to salary or position. For instance, a janitor might be happier than a department director, and we can’t help but envy the former.

Serious business, serious profit!

Healthcare and medicine came in at the very top. Companies in the healthcare industry generated $36.3 billion in the U.S. (data from 380 companies).

Running Starts

Time really flies: it might feel like “startup” became the new buzzword just yesterday, but in reality, it’s already been about ten years since we started using it.

How to Get more Done and See the Bigger Picture

Working in an office means lots of crazy days where you’re extremely busy and overwhelmed with super-urgent problems, but by the evening you realize you haven’t completed anything really noteworthy or important.

Think like a client and transform your business

Everyone knows how important it is for business leaders and employees to understand their clients. Not only understanding their needs, but feeling real empathy.
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