Making Work Easier: Tactical Tips for Better Productivity

I love reading about small businesses and freelancers who find tricks that allow them to do what they do better. I cover a lot of this kind of content in my Tips In Ten newsletter where I try to provide the business “hacks” that have worked for me.

In a recent blog post at LocationIndependent.com, a site for businesses that can work anywhere (i.e., freelancers or web-based entrepreneurs), they listed a number of really useful things to do to automate business.

Now, before I reference the blog any further, let me just say that automating your business is one of the smartest things you can do. The more you automate, the bigger your business will grow, and the faster it will get there. That’s because so much of our day is sucked away with time-intensive tasks that are often (more than we realize) repetitive. If you can automate these, you can focus more of your time on the unique stuff (and usually that’s the stuff that adds value to your customers).

So here is a brief recap of what LocationIndepent.com talked about in their blog post “Tactical Tips to Put Your Location Independent Business On Autopilot”.

The first set of tips is a Mac-only tip recommending Mac’s Automator function. For those who don’t use Mac, many of the tactics are still easily accomplishable on our lowly PC’s. For example, the writer recommends using Mac’s Automator to automatically back-up files. I have the same thing with JungleDisk and Amazon S3. It’s automatic.

The second set of tips has to do with your browser. This is a huge area of opportunity for people because they often do more repetitive tasks online than they realize. Even though I already do a lot of this stuff I still catch myself from time to time opening and closing a tab a zillion times in a day. (“Hello, Heather, you can keep it open and save yourself a lot of time”).

The third set of tips offered some good advice for Gmail users (and if you’re a reader of my Tips In Ten, I recommend some software for business owners who use email on their own servers to accomplish a lot of what is mentioned in this blog.

The fourth set of tips is for blogs and is some great advice. If you’ve ever posted the phrase “I’m sorry I haven’t blogged in a while, I’ve been busy” on your blog, these tips are for you. (And yes, I know that everyone has typed that at one time or another).

Take the five minutes to read the blog and another half an hour to incorporate many of Location Independent’s techniques and you’ll save yourself many multiples of hours in the future.

Until next time!

Related posts:

1. Make Bookkeeping Faster & Easier in Less Than 10 Minutes a Day!
2. 10 Tips to Boost Productivity
3. Productivity Starts with the Right Pieces in Place
4. Making Ideas Happen: How to Act on Great Strategies
5. 5 Common Productivity Barriers and How to Eliminate Them