If time is money, this story is bad news

How much time do your employees waste each day?

According to a study reported Friday by Inc Magazine it's as much as 50 percent. Yikes! If you're a small business that has scrapped and saved in order to finally make a hire or two, that has to be a little scary. The study - somewhat self serving from a business communications company - found that:

Workers spend more than a third of their time (36 percent) trying to contact customers, partners or colleagues; find information, or schedule a meeting. (When, exactly, should you schedule a meeting? Another survey says Tuesday afternoon.)  Another 14 percent of an employee's day: duplicating information (forwarding emails or phone calls to confirm if fax/e-mail/text message was received) and managing unwanted communications, such as spam or unsolicited phone calls.

There are many issues we could talk about in relationship to this story including employee management, but the problem really is how to reclaim the lost time and make employees more productive.

A well-worn metric of computing is that the average user utilizes less than 10 percent of the functionality of any program. Unfortunately, this has been a casualty of managers who don't understand or promote technology, the lack of real training and ongoing reinforcement of best practices and an overall acceptance of one of the most innovation-killing attitudes found in almost all workplaces: "We've always done it this way."

Perhaps. But that's not a requirement. Here are three tips on ways to do it differently.

1. The largest installed email/calendaring program in the world is Outlook. Chances are your office is running it. If so, we can save a lot of time by using the program's scheduling functions to schedule meetings. Easily set up groups from your company's address book either for permanent or temporary teams. Create a project team group, select the group when scheduling and open the scheduling assistant. The assistant will show you all the individuals in the group and their free time. Use the "find free time" feature to find the available times when everyone on your team can meet.

2. Not all meetings are internal and setting up times with clients, customers and vendors can be even more challenging. Several tools utilizing internet-based "cloud" services tackle - and solve - this challenge. Timebridge is our favorite. Link your calendar to the Timebridge service and scheduling a meeting is a three-step process: enter the names of the people you want to meet with (if they are in your address book you only have to start typing the names), write a message to your attendees, then select five times from your calendar that are available. Alternately, you can allow your attendees to select times that are open in your calendar.

Timebridge does everything else: Attendees are brought to an interface where they can select all the times that will work and a "best" time. When everyone's agreed on one, the service sends an email confirming the date, time and other meeting details. What used to take 5-7 emails per attendee to accomplish, is done in one web site and three steps.

3. The biggest time waster the survey found was managing email with 50 percent of the day spent on it. We are working for the technology rather than making it work for us. To turn that situation around, make Outlook rules your friend. You have a very powerful organizational tool in rules if you take the time to learn them. You can assign incoming mail to projects or clients based on email address or domain name, you can move automated messages, message receipts and meeting acceptances out of your way and into a holding folder, you can send newsletters, RSS feeds, automated mailing lists into a "read me later" folder. With just a few rules, you can get your inbox down to a more manageable size of items that require action.

There are many more tools on the average person's desktop that can help you save time, be more efficient and more productive. If time is money then it's worth it to learn how to stop wasting so much of it.
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Portfolio can help your company make up for lost time and regain productivity. Contact us at 864-213-6314 or email info@portfoliosc.com to find out how we can help.

Cut costs with free productivity tools

By Laura Haight

How much money does your company spend on software? How much time do you waste either because you can't afford the software or services you need?

If you're like most businesses, you don't even want to know the answers to those questions.It's time to think differently and take advantage of a number of free tools from software suites to meeting management tools and web conferencing programs.

Learn how your business can take advantage of the many free tools for small businesses that are available to you. What's worth it and what's not. The Greenville Business Strategy and Networking Meetup group is sponsoring my presentation of Freebies on Tuesay, Nov 16 at 6:30 pm at The Franchisemart, 1268 Woodruff Rd., Greenville.

To sign up to attend follow this link.

Are you getting what you pay for? Maybe not and you can be paying a lot less and getting much, much more.We'll look forward to seeing you there.

Married to Microsoft?

When was the last time you merged data from Access or Excel into a Word document? Or the last time you created a "What If" scenario in Excel? If you can't remember, there's a good chance that you are typical user of basic office productivity tools. See if this describes you:

You primarily use Word to create letters, documents, reports. You mostly use text and, perhaps, you collaborate with others on the document - usually sending it to them for suggestions (as opposed to tracking changes of multiple users through commenting and reviewing).

You basically use Excel as a way to structure information, to do basic calculations such as summing and percentages or perhaps to make numbers look more attractive.

You think of Outlook as your email client. Maybe you use the task and calendaring options for yourself but rarely to collaborate with others.

If these statements seem like you then you are probably using roughly 10% of the functions of the Office suite of applications. Don't be embarrassed, you are like a lot of people. Everyone uses Office so you figure you should to.

If you are a business person, you may feel that you have to use Office so you can send files to clients, customers, vendors and others you do business with.

Although this was once true, it's not anymore. The past decade has seen a growing proliferation of office productivity tools - many free - with an increasingly impressive array of functions. And they integrate most functions with Office.

Open Office 3 is a free productivity suite with a full-featured tool set. The software can open Office files and vice versa, although not all functionality is supported.

Google Docs has gone into the cloud with its application suite. Not only is it free but you don't even have to worry about upkeep - the constant patches, fixes and updates - or about storing your files. Google docs does it all "in the cloud" - meaning online in a shared, collaborative workspace. You can have a personal account and share files with others, export files into Office or pdf formats and upload Office files you receive from others into your Google workspace.

For a small business, you can use Google Apps which is a branded workspace for your company that includes domain-branded email, contacts, docs, calendars and tasks for all your users. If your data storage needs are smaller, you can go with a standard (meaning FREE) account; if you need more space, the cost per user per year is $50.

So with all of these options - and there are others we haven't even talked about - one has to wonder why Microsoft's Office is still at a 94% market share.

There is no doubt that Office has far more functionality than anything else. But when few people use those options or, for that matter, need those options, it seems silly to buy a Mercedes to drive 35 mph to church on Sunday.

For small businesses, technology is a huge expense and there are many things you shouldn't be skimping on -- like security, data protection, customer contact and relationship tracking -- among a few. For some businesses, spending $500 per copy for Office is just a cost of doing business; for other's it may be an unnecessarily high technology expense. Find out where you fall and, if you decide Office has the features you need, invest in learning how to make the most of them.