No matter what stage of business you are in, you will always find that you just need more time in your day. Having a schedule for your day is helpful, but the best way to find more time is to automate the “time sucks” in your daily routine. You can use automation to stay on task, reduce distraction, and gain back those precious hours for your business.
Here are my FAVORITE 5 Hacks to Automate Your Daily Routine:
Hack #1:
Create Focus
If you organize your software and programs correctly, you can create dashboards for your business. My dashboard is Asana, because that tells me everything I need to do as well as lets me keep tabs on my team. When you sit down to work and immediately open your email or Facebook or any other program, you start to go down that rabbit hole. Setting start pages in my browser as Asana, I am presented with my to-do list first and foremost.
Hack #2:
Automate Your Inbox
Since I use Asana as my dashboard, my email has become secondary. I still need it for communication, but I always use Asana to see which request came in first, which project an email is attached to and so on. In order to get Asana to filter information, I use the filter and forward settings in Gmail to send information to Asana and also label and auto-archive emails that I can categorize based on different criteria.This allows me to have only a few emails coming to my actual inbox each day.
Hack #3:
Automate Social Media
If you aren’t using a scheduling program you are wasting time in your business. Invest in a program like Tailwind, Hootsuite, Coschedule, what have you. Then you can batch schedule a month’s worth of content in an hour and put your social media on autopilot.
Hack #4:
Automate Repetitive Tasks
I am a huge (HUGE) fan of Zapier. I spend about $25 a month and basically have a full-time, personal assistant. I can get Zapier to create and send new Zoom meeting links to anyone I create an online meeting with whether they use Calendly to book or if I make an appointment directly on my calendar. I have 20 different Zaps that do things from adding new payments to a google spreadsheet to automating my onboarding process.
Hack #5:
Use a Scheduler
Finding a time to meet with clients or leads across various time zones with a complex schedule is such a time suck. Really. How many hours do you spend per month just finding a time that fits everyone’s schedule? Setting up a scheduler that finds openings on your calendar based on length of meeting, how much time you need between meetings, and on specific days helps you communicate with your clients or leads when you can meet in an easy to book fashion.
I hope that you found these 5 Hacks To Automate Your Daily Routine valuable, and look forward to sharing more ways with you on how you can improve your business systems.