‘A good system shortens the road to the goal’ – Orison Swett Marden

Imagine you are in your basement, working on a project and building your online store. You are so excited about it. You dreamed that one day, you’d be one of those privileged people enjoying themselves in the Bahamas and sipping margaritas.

So, you began to build your website.

A few weeks later, your sales started to gather ever-increasing momentum.

As your business grew, you realized that there was more than just building a website for you to succeed. Aside from maintaining your website, there are a lot of things that you need to look into—production, marketing, delivery, accounting, and much more. You needed to go through a whole lot of processes, communication methods, working patterns and various other ways to get something done.

You got caught in the cycle of your day-to-day business operations, and your dream of going to the Bahamas is still a dream (for now, I hope).

Does this sound familiar?

Well, you’re not alone. According to a new survey from Skift, almost half of Americans took fewer than three days of vacation this summer, with more than 37% taking no vacation at all.

So, if you find yourself constantly stretched for time—with so many things to do and only so many hours in a day to get all things done—try these simple ways to reclaim minutes spent on time-consuming tasks.

Prioritize

List down the tasks or projects that you want to get done. Filter the essentially important business priorities, from the urgent-for-the-moment to the less important ones, and keep your focus on what matters most for your success.

Set boundaries

Know when to say ‘no’ and when to say ‘yes’. If the task does not link back to the goals that you are trying to achieve, you should probably say ‘no’ to it. Take an inventory of everything you are working on—can they be delegated or reassigned?

Create a Cheat Sheet

If you find yourself repeatedly answering the same questions, why not prepare a message in your notepad? When customers, employees or suppliers ask you the same questions, you can just cut and paste.

You can also list down the names, emails and phone numbers of the people whom you regularly contact—so that whenever you need to contact them, this list is handily available.

Automate Your Applications

The type of automation will depend on your business needs. There’s no shortage of high-tech solutions to business automation in the market today; everything, from marketing to payroll to customer support, can be automated and streamlined to some degree.

Integrating two systems together can even turn your business applications into a more productive engine.

A good example of this is the linksync integrations. It has helped hundreds of businesses by syncing common applications and eliminating one of the most repetitive and boring tasks in the business—data entry.

Through linksync integration, you don’t need to manually enter data from one system to another. The data automatically flows from one system and is reflected in the other system in an instant.

Here are some of the popular integrations from linksync:

• WooCommerce and Vend POS Integration
• WooCommerce and QuickBooks Online Integration
• Magento and QuickBooks Online Integration
• WooCommerce and Australia Post eParcel Integration
• Magento and Australia Post eParcel Integration

Ultimately, if you value your time at all and want to do your tasks faster, you just need to simplify, delegate and automate your work.