3 Clever Ways to Waste Less Time on Email

In business, it’s often the case that you spend more time talking about work than you spend actually doing the work. How many emails have you sent recently that could be described as “email tennis?” We won’t mince words; this endless back-and-forth discussing meeting times, checking calendars, and re-typing the same responses day-in and day-out is increasing your administrative friction and wasting your time.

Today, we’re exploring three ways you can automate scheduling and communication to put an end to the emails and finally get back to work.

Implement Self-Service Scheduling

How much overhead goes into planning a meeting with more than one or two people? The answer: a lot. It’s a massive waste of bandwidth and energy.

Playing calendar tag in this way leaves a mental tab open that makes you wonder if and when the person will respond, and what you’ll do when they suggest a time that doesn’t work. Instead, you should move to a self-service scheduling system that syncs with your real-time availability. This puts the onus on the person scheduling the meeting to find a time that works for both of you.

Some tips to centralize a scheduling link: set specific work blocks for meetings, automate any follow-up messages that need to go out, and gather information up-front so you can have a productive meeting.

Standardize Your Frequently Asked Responses

If you’re issuing the same directions, answering the same questions, or just generally repeating yourself a lot, you can save yourself some time (and more than a few headaches) with canned responses.

Most small businesses have a core set of communications that make up about 80 percent of their email volume. Instead of having your team copy and paste old responses from the Sent folder, build up your library of communication templates. These pre-written, high-quality blocks of content can be inserted into emails in just a couple of seconds.

Every customer gets the same correspondence, email attachments won’t be forgotten, and response times will be significantly faster. Do the work once, sit back, and relax as the technology does the hard work for you.

Use Templates for Recurring Projects

The tedium of any new project stems from starting from scratch, whether it’s onboarding a new employee, onboarding a new client, or simply answering questions that you’ve already answered a thousand times before.

For many small businesses, these processes exist inside someone’s head rather than out on paper. This lack of documentation is what kills productivity and leaves people asking questions that, quite frankly, waste everybody’s time. Standardized project templates in your task management system provide your team with clear, repeatable checklists as soon as a project begins.

Using templates, you’ll be able to delegate with confidence, put a halt to any guesswork, and scale over time. The goal here is simple: to free up your team’s time so they can provide more personal, high-touch experiences where they matter most… and cut out where they don’t. You’ll be amazed at how much progress you can make when you stop repeating yourself and do the work needed to move a project along.

For starters, look in your outgoing mail folder and find a message you’ve sent more than twice in the past two days. That’s an excellent place to start.

Suffolk Computer Consultants can help your business be more effective through the smart use of technology automation tools. Learn more today by calling us at 631-905-9617.