The tools that allow improving productivity and time management can also be applied to two essential aspects of our daily work: meetings and email.
Unproductive Meetings
Why do meetings fail? It’s difficult to work without meetings, but it’s certainly possible to work without most of them. They usually fail due two three reasons: lack of a clear agenda and objectives; lack of punctuality when starting and finishing them; and lack of next steps. From these three reasons, we can infer also three key questions that should be addressed at each meeting: What should be done? Who’s going to do it? When will it be done? That is to say, for a meeting to be productive, it must be translated into tangible actions.
Bad Email Habits Die Hard
Email management is such a broad topic that we could write a whole book on it. However, some very specific bad habits related to email can easily be spotted. Identifying and correcting these habits is part of the overall improvement process we should all implement while using email programs. After all, these programs tend to rapidly turn into a “weapon of productive destruction” that gives us the illusion of control, but is actually controlling us.
Here are two golden rules for using email better:
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Check your email fewer times a day. Constantly checking our inbox makes us waste a lot of time and causes distraction. However, limiting the number of times we have a look at our inbox to four will greatly improve our performance. We can even disable the pop-up message that tells us when we have new email. Ideally, we should open our email only when necessary.
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Decide what to do with each email as we go. One of the key premises when using email is “don’t read email; just process it and act accordingly”. We should save emails as pending, move them to a specific folder, deal with them if they imply a minor task or delete them.
To make our lives easier, email programs have an extraordinary, but generally little known tool: rules or filters that allow us to organize our emails automatically and classify them according to our personal criteria. It’s important to bear in mind that we usually have several email accounts –both for personal and professional purposes– which makes the email classification task even harder. Every email has a different priority that determines when and what we should do with it, which means that, without rules or filters, our inbox quickly turns into a chaotic mess. Setting rules avoids your inbox from overflowing with unread emails or ignored important messages. In general terms, we should apply rules or filters if we receive around 40 emails or more per day and review these guidelines every two months, approximately.
Our productivity levels can also be affected by the lack of clarity in our emails. Improving the structure and clarity of our emails will have a direct impact on our efficiency when replying, which, in turn, is critical for our time management. Before writing any message, we should decide if it’s the best option (because, sometimes, it’s not). If we decide to write the email, then we should try to write maximum three lines, thus creating a direct and accurate message. Let’s avoid Bible-type emails and never use them as a chat.
In addition, when drafting the message, we should also make sure to correctly describe the task or topic in the email (what, when and how) and avoid mixing topics in the same email. This way, the recipient will find it easier to understand, process and classify our message. Finally, it’s equally essential to carefully choose the email subject.
The email subject must be concise and accurate in order to catch the recipient’s attention and make email searches simpler. For example, it’s easier if we use key words and we may even agree with our email recipients on groups of words that define the importance of topics, e.g. “action” or “decision” for priority topics, and “meeting” or “notice” for non-priority communications.
Document Output Management Software
However, email is not the only computer tool that helps us improve our productivity. Many organizations are turning to comprehensive document software solutions in order to take a quantum leap in their overall effort and process optimization, at an individual (employees, customers and third parties) as well as at a corporate level.
At an individual level, there are four key advantages of incorporating document software into their lives (among many other benefits):
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Adequate document software solutions allow optimizing document processes in organizations with a large number of widely spread offices and subsidiaries. In this way, any worker can instantly generate, view and send a proposal, policy or invoice by email, fax or the corporate Intranet.
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These solutions can be handled from any online device and allow workers to check or generate a document at any time and in any place.
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Employees from banks and other financial institutions can generate detailed professional reports in a quick and efficient manner.
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New interfaces are easy to use and, therefore, increase productivity per employee using them
At a corporate level, document software solutions also provide significant benefits:
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hey increase a company’s overall productivity by streamlining the whole document flow: from design to generation, application of post processes and distribution.
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Marketing actions are more efficient, since document software helps to dynamically include advertising in transactional documents such as invoices and policies.
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The solutions that generate document process statistics allow companies to analyze processes and undertake measures in case of low performance.
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Toner and ink saving document solutions help implement printing and toner reduction policies for specific employee profiles or by department.
In general terms, with Document Output Management software, companies save time and, therefore, increase their productivity. According to recent studies, each employee dedicates an average of half an hour per day to manual processing of different kinds of documents or files, and this estimate is considerably higher in departments such as Finance or Accounting.
Moreover, we should not forget two innovations that represent a major breakthrough in the business world: electronic invoicing and digital signature. With the former, a lot of time and money are saved, since we don’t need to print invoices, fold them, put them into envelopes and sending them by post. With the latter, there’s no need to manually sign and physically send any document.
To sum up, there is a wide variety of tools and software that help us improve our productivity levels at a corporate and an individual level. Many aspects must be taken into account, but, in the end, it simply comes down to common sense, innovation and cooperation.
Sources of information:
http://www.digisystems.es/software-documental/es/
André Klein
Freelance Consultant for DocPath