Published on January 19th, 2019 | by Guest

Tips and Tools to Automate Your Busy Work

Whether you operate a small business, you’re an independent entrepreneur, or you work for a large organization, time is always one of the things you’re probably looking for more of.

One of the most satisfying ways to get more time in your day is to automate the busy work. Busy work means those tasks that need to be done, but they’re slow, tedious and require little if any creativity.

When you’re able to automate these tasks, you can focus on being more strategic and look at opportunities for growth, rather than feeling like you’re trudging through the burdensome but essential tasks every day.

The following are some tips and tools you can utilize to automate busy work or tasks that are time-consuming and repetitive.

Email Outreach

Chances are you do some type of email outreach pretty frequently. It’s important and it’s necessary. It also needs to be highly tailored and personalized, so you may be spending hours working on these objectives every week.

“Personalization is the name of the game when it comes to email outreach. If you aren’t personalizing, your results are going to be subpar,” according to blogger Ajay Goel.

So, how can you send out personalized email outreach campaigns without the busy work?

There are different options and one of them is using a mass email and mail merge tool like GMass, which works with Gmail. You can quickly and easily automate many of your email outreach tasks, yet you can maintain those elements so important for effective emails, such as personalization.

Systemic Email Organization

Along with changing how you do email outreach, you might want to give your entire email system a revamp. You can do this by creating a streamlined system for dealing with emails as they come in, sorting them, and responding to them.

Within Gmail you can utilize something as simple as the smart label system. This will let you take certain keywords and create a way to organize your incoming emails based on those.

You don’t even need a sophisticated automation tool beyond your Gmail account to make this happen.

Then, you can set up automated responses to certain emails that require only a brief response.

HR Technology

A place where you might be struggling to keep up with the workload is finding candidates and the hiring process. You’ll need a little more technology to make things work well in a streamlined way as compared to emails, but it’s still possible.

Look for a collaborative HR platform that will let you gather and view relevant data in a centralized location. This way, if you’re in charge of hiring or you have input in the decisions, you can quickly see the information that your HR department or recruiters are seeking.

Also, find a platform with a robust applicant tracking system. This lets all the key stakeholders in recruiting and hiring work together during the process.

Approvals

Chances are that if you’re a company leader, an entrepreneur or a manager then you get a lot of requests each day and you have to spend time approving them. This is a good area to integrate technology and automation.

There are different place where you may be in charge of issuing fairly simple decisions but despite the simplicity of those decisions, it’s still time-consuming and repetitive. For example, maybe you get expense requests or requests for paid time off.

Look for technology that lets you set up your own parameters for how these decisions are made, based on AI. Then, within the parameters you include in the technology, decision-making can be automated. You’re not having to go through the requests, make the decisions or do a lot of unnecessary paperwork in the process.

Data Collection and Reports

Finally, if you are still manually putting together data in order to build BI reports, it’s time to put a stop to it.

You’re probably not an analytics expert and even if you are, if you’re spending a lot of time here it doesn’t have to be that way. If you choose effective, modernized software and technology it can take data, extrapolate relevant insights and then deliver reports to the people who need them.

This will not only free you up or your employees but it will also help improve strategy and numbers-driven decision-making throughout your organization. Rather than struggling with analyzing and creating reports, receive the information in a timely, organized way and then spend your time using that data in valuable ways.

Tags: apps, automation, email, hr, organization, outreach, personalization, technology, time management, work