How to get more hours in your day

Time is always running out. We can't stop time. We can't save it up. We can't use it later.

True right?

Wrong.

Actually, with the right investments, we can all save time. We can all make time. It's not easy but when you get it right, it's an incredible feeling.

The investment comes in figuring out exactly what it is that you do. Writing it down, in painstaking detail. Then asking someone else to do the same thing, using only your notes. Then rewriting those notes to handle the places where they got it wrong. And repeat. Draft after draft until you've got an accurate description of the things you do, in language that everyone can understand.

Then you find the decision points - where does someone have to take a decision and how does that decision affect what you're doing? What information do they need to make that decision? How do they gather that information?

And then we automate it.

For example, if you have a weekly report to generate, that collates information about your weekly sales, your turnover and your productivity - can you make all that information electronically? If so, we can write a small app, called a script, that grabs that information, squashes it together and produces your report for you. A task that used to take you an hour on a Sunday evening now takes twenty seconds first thing on Monday morning. Even better - why make this a weekly report? Why not re-run it every minute and put the results on a big screen in the office. So you have live information about your business performance.

The hours you spent documenting what you do and organising that information get condensed into a fraction of a second of report generation. Saving you that hour every week. And giving your company better and more up-to-date information.