Sometimes the problem is communication, especially for appointments. Even the necessary meetings can cause a lot of time-wasting. The inefficiency starts with the back and forth emails to schedule the appointment. Next, there are reminders and following up after you confirm and schedule the work. Last, and perhaps most tedious, is checking your other calendars and keeping track of the tasks or other engagements that may affect your plans.

1. Use instant messaging

The easiest way to get around the snail pace of email communication is to use instant messaging. After making initial contact, the remaining communication to schedule the appointment can happen over an instant messaging platform. This way, unnecessary messages won’t flood your inbox that you could have addressed more quickly with IM.

2. Use your mailbox provider’s built-in scheduling tools

Many mailbox providers like Gmail and Yahoo! Mail have calendars as part of their suite of apps. You can schedule your meetings, adjust dates and times as necessary through these.

Google Workspace does a great job integrating its suite of apps. Once you set appointments or events on your Google calendar, the application will send you notifications (or emails) to remind you as the date and time approaches. For many, the Google Workspace will be the most convenient because they already use one or more of Google’s products, like Gmail.

3. Hire a Virtual Assistant

This one is a no-brainer. When the workload is too big or complex for you to handle alone, get help! With a virtual assistant, you have someone to take your calls and manage your schedule remotely. A good virtual assistant will take all that stress off your shoulders, enabling you to focus on running and growing your company.

4. Use scheduling apps

Apps like Calendly do the work of a virtual assistant, at light speed, at a fraction of the cost. Your clients or team members can schedule meetings with a few clicks. Rescheduling is just as easy. All your synced calendars will be updated automatically. Additionally, you can automate reminders and follow-ups. You don’t even have to spend time sending thank you messages.

These powerful features are the main reason Calendly is a prominent feature in our Dominate Tech Software Playbook.

The paid version of Calendly has even more helpful features. However, the free version may be more than enough to give your business a significant boost. One conversation with our consultants will help you learn what tools are best for your enterprise.

There are several other software tools that you can use to solve a wide range of problems that your small business may encounter. Stay tuned for more tips on our next blog post. Learn how to use the best software to optimise your business processes and maximise profit – Book a consultation with Dominate Tech NOW!

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Time itself appears to be infinite; however, the hours in a workday aren’t. Every business has a finite number of hours in every cycle to achieve its objectives. The allocation of physical and financial resources may vary from company to company; but, everyone has to work within the same hours. Your business may not have the same financial resources as a competitor. Still, you can close that gap by using your time more efficiently. Your firm’s ability to leverage this advantage depends on your team’s quality and efficiency.

The typical entrepreneur spends a lot more time thinking about their product/service or managing their capital. Much less thought is given to optimizing their teams, and it shows. The average worker only spends 34% to 40% of their workday doing productive, skilled labour. For a company with a group of 10 employees, that’s 160 to 264 man-hours lost every week. That’s the equivalent of losing up to a year and a half’s worth of man-hours annually. This wastage could be crippling or fatal to a small firm if you consider the cost of that time in wages, lost production and lost potential sales.

Every small business owner must find a way to maximize the productivity of their team. If you can reclaim just 20% of that lost time, it could mean tens of thousands of dollars saved and tens of thousands more made. Understandably, small business owners spend thousands on courses, software and other tools to improve their productivity. Nevertheless, there are free tools they can leverage to achieve measurable progress.

Asana is an application that fulfils this need. It allows business owners to create projects, organize tasks in those projects, track progress and create teams remotely. You can also manage assignments and projects in a list for simplicity or on a Kanban board for better visualization. The search feature makes sure that you always have information, past or present, at your fingertips.

Having all the tasks laid out with progress levels visible removes the need to meet to establish objectives. You won’t need to interrupt an employee to check on their progress. These features are excellent for transparency, as anyone can see what tasks are complete, in progress or to be completed. Asana even eliminates task redundancy by allowing you to place tasks in multiple projects and place a team member in on several tasks/projects. This works well for all kinds of firms, especially those that employ remote workers. Asana can also be integrated with other free applications to automate functions and increase the utility of the application to your company.

Leveraging just the free features of Asana can help you limit those lost hours. This is just one of the apps we cover in our software playbook.

If you’re reading this during work hours, you’re already losing time and opportunity in this competitive environment. Fortunately, you don’t have to do all the work improving your team’s efficiency. Our team at Dominate Tech can help you reclaim some of those lost hours and improve your output.

Stay tuned for more tips on our next blog post. Don’t hesitate to improve your small business’ efficiency! Book a consultation with Dominate Tech today!

The post Recovering Lost Time first appeared on dominatetech.com.

Good communication is fundamental to a profitable business. The public tends to associate “communication” with marketing, public relations and a business’ other external interactions. However, business owners and employees know that internal communication is just as important if not more important. You will often hear internal communication referred to as the glue that holds an organization together—the weaker the bond, the faster business processes breakdown. If your team can’t communicate properly, they will waste a lot of time, which ultimately costs your business money.

Small business owners worry about the coordination of their teams. Their enterprises lack robust training programs and established systems like larger firms. If you’re an entrepreneur, you’ll understand the pressure of keeping your company productive with a small number of employees and big performance expectations. While you’re busy trying to keep things in the black, the lack of communication between yourself and your personnel stands out. The knee-jerk reaction to this problem is to check in more often with your employees, schedule more meetings, and frequently change team priorities based on work status. This “work about work” most likely costs your business a lot more than you can imagine.

According to Asana’s Anatomy of Work Index, the typical worker spends 60% of their time on “work about work” and not doing skilled work. If your team spends more time talking about work than working, you’re not communicating effectively. Bad management is usually to blame. However, circumstances can also be part of the problem.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to effective team communication is remote work. Remote work is typically a way to reduce overheads, but now, it has become necessary for many business owners. The transition to remote work exposes the weaknesses in communication —inadequate reporting mechanisms, no system for task updates, limited means of remote collaboration.

The obvious solution here is to employ a Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service with instant messaging. Many hosted VoIP services for businesses can help you solve any communication problems, but cost remains a pressing matter. Paying for a hosted VoIP service only adds to overhead costs. Fortunately, there is a free alternative that solves these problems.

Discord is a VoIP service, with capabilities for instant messaging, file sharing and more. Your enterprise can have a private server with different channels for text, voice and live video streaming. You can even add bots to the discord server to automate a wide range of tasks or effectively add features. For example, you can add a bot that periodically posts industry news from a site of your choosing. Discord’s versatility is remarkable even with the free version, which is more than enough for a small or micro-enterprise.

Unfortunately, Discord’s biggest strength is also its greatest weakness in a business context. Its sandbox nature makes the initial learning curve a bit steep for those unfamiliar with the service. Business-focused VoIP services tend to be more streamlined to meet specific business needs.

For some firms, the bare bones are good enough. Regardless, it all comes down to finding the most cost-effective solution.

Discord offers near-limitless possibilities without the prohibitively expensive cost. You can try your hand at learning how to use Discord to optimize your communication or have our team at Dominate Tech make it easy for you.

Stay tuned for more tips on our next blog post. Don’t hesitate to improve your small business’ communication! Book a consultation with Dominate Tech today!

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