5 Ways to Enhance Small Business Productivity Digitally

Efficiency is an elusive friend; some days, there aren’t enough hours to accommodate our ability to pour out work and, others, there doesn’t seem to be enough throughput to fill the hours.

Getting the most out of each and every working day is about balance, and that can be made much simpler by discovering and harnessing the tools and tricks of the trade that capture our most effectual moments, and spread them throughout the working day.

Read more below about some of the best ways to enhance your efficiency online.

1. Integrate Your Website’s Development, Management and Analysis Under One Roof

Now more than ever, your site is one of your business’s most important assets, and choosing a platform on which you can successfully design and operate your site will offer the best approach for streamlining all aspects of managing your online presence. Platforms like WordPress’s website builder offer plug-ins that allow for seamless integration, both in terms of the day-to-day tasks of content publication and social media cross-posting, and for accessing all analytics pertaining to your online presence.

You can take a look at this WordPress website builder review for a more comprehensive breakdown of the ways in which the platform can manage your site, as well as create it.

2. Replace Meetings with Digital Collaboration

One study completed by the Atlassian found that the average office worker will spend more than thirty hours a week in meetings that do not prove to be particularly fruitful. What’s more, this lack of productivity accounted for half of all meetings held.

You can limit time spent in meetings by practicing the ‘stand up’ meeting, which will keep you and your employees from getting too comfortable, and facilitate a more concise approach. Alternatively, there are plenty of excellent apps for speeding-up workplace collaboration. From instant messengers to file sharing, utilizing tools that foster a more instantaneous approach to communication offers a much better alternative to traditional meetings.

3. Streamline Your Accounting with a Dedicated App

There are few things that are best left until later – and accounting is not one of them. Committing numbers to paper may be the tried and tested method, but integrating your check book, bank accounts, tax preparation, invoices and expenses within one easy to use app will save you hours – particularly at the end of the month.

Apps like QuickBooks and Wave are ideal for small businesses looking to track day-to-day ingoings and outgoings, create, send, and edit invoices, and prepare for tax season. You can sync-up all relevant accounts, which will keep you from switching back and forth, and enable you to record everything as-and-when it happens, rather than keeping track of countless files.

4. Focus on 90-Minute Stints

Productivity is not a personality trait – none of us are inherently efficient or slow. One of the best ways of harnessing productivity is to focus on our own time management, rather than to pursue it continuously throughout the day, and to follow the golden rule of 90-minutes on, followed by 30-minutes off.

Unfortunately, we are not always the best judges of our own time – particularly when we are focusing on the task at hand. Apps like Toggl and Hourstack come rated highly for their ability to keep you on track, and perfect those all important time management skills.

5. Prioritize or Outsource Tasks

We all know how to prioritize but, from time to time, practicing what we preach is not quite so simple. Apps like Pocket enable you to save everything non-essential in the same place, which will save you the time it takes to trawl through your browser history, scribbled notes, and that mental backlog of ‘things to return back to’.

When the Apps are not sufficient, think about getting a custom software development company to make a tool to suit your business and work style.

Altering our workday routine isn’t easy, but by organizing our To Do lists in a tangible way, you will find it much simpler to visualize your schedule, and organize – and re-organize – it around the most pressing tasks.