The more, the merrier — until you’ve had enough.
For example, you might think that you can never have enough clients. More clients mean growth; more profit, more employees (if you own a company)... and more work. If you’re doing everything right year after year, this is the scenario you can certainly expect.
However, with everything mentioned comes more pressure and more deadlines to meet, and almost not enough time.
If you constantly find yourself completely burnt out at the end of the workweek, or notice that each weekend passes with you still tinkering with your tasks — it’s time for a change.
One way is just to stop accepting new projects and new clients for a while, but that’s boring. We recommend the other way — getting smarter about the way you work!
Before you shrug and think “but I already work full capacity and give my 100%”, consider using your time in a better way. What we mean by that is letting someone (and/or something) else handle a slice of your workload, and focusing on more complex segments yourself.
This will not only bring much-needed ease but enhance productivity as well! Doing more in less time is a dream that you can make true by:
- Automation — using intelligent tools to save you from manual labor
- Outsourcing — hiring talented teams/individuals to work on certain areas (marketing or outreach, for example)
Keep reading, and you will find out how to successfully automate everything you can, and how to carry out the outsourcing process.
Increasing Workplace Productivity Through Automation
What should you automate anyway?
There is plenty of ways to answer that question, but it’s safe to say that these should be the main points to consider:
- Recurring and repetitive tasks
- Things that take a considerable amount of time and/or effort
- Safety procedures that allow human errors otherwise
- Everything that doesn’t require immediate human attention
The following categories tick all the boxes mentioned above and are just some examples of tasks that are safe to automate with reliable tools. Another example would be to use an automated proposal generator to boost the efficiency of your sales team.
LinkedIn Outreach Automation
As of 2020, LinkedIn has more than 722 million users, all of them looking to find new associates, clients, jobs and other business opportunities. It is a powerhouse of new prospects, but each of them has to be fished out and vetted first. After that comes creating a perfect pitch, waiting for the response, rinse and repeat.
This is how outreach on LinkedIn looks like in a nutshell when you try and meticulously personalize each message to increase the chance of getting a satisfying answer.
The good news is — there are tools out there that do all of this for you! One example is Expandi.io, dedicated entirely to Linkedin automation. If you’re worrying about tools sending dozens of the same, robotic messages and you getting blocked for spam, just read about their hyper-personalization Dynamic Placeholder!
Evaluating Job Candidates
After you go through a bunch of resumes, pick out the most interesting candidates, and have a chat with them, it’s time to test their skills.
How hard this part is getting depends on the type of job, but hiring new programmers is known to be especially tedious. The HR teams often know little about coding and making your developer team do it means they’ll lose a lot of time. Sometimes, there are just no people around who could assess their knowledge!
Well, there’s a tool for that too!
DevSkiller provides you with a huge amount of various coding tests and interview questions so you can easily pick the perfect candidate. Angular test, Ruby, Python, SQL — you name it, it’s there! The best thing is that you or your HRs don’t need to know a single line of code. Set up the desired seniority and skills, send the test to your candidates, and that’s it.
One Inbox to Rule Them All
This is more about streamlining customer interaction than it is about automation.
If you depend on social media to connect with your customers and use all of the big ones actively, a unified social media inbox will make your life easier. You’ll spend less time switching between profiles and have fewer passwords to manage.
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, even WhatsApp and Viber — mash them all and access them instantly. There’s plenty of options out there, just search “Social Inbox” or social media engagement tool and pick the one that integrates social media you use.
How to Outsource to Enhance Productivity
You can (and should) outsource the tasks that:
- Are hard to manage due to external factors (for example, your location)
- Take too much time, money and / or effort to complete
- Aren’t essential to your expertise
- You’re simply not good at
However, there are things you should never outsource — those that you do best, and make your product/ service unique! Those are the critical parts of your company, something other people hire you for. Stuff being boring is not a good reason to get rid of them.
Outsourcing Options
Let’s say you own or manage an IT company. Outsourcing the marketing sector just seems logical if you don’t want to (or cannot) have a designated department in your HQ. You can let them handle the full scope of activities, i.e. to outsource to an agency in the entirety.
But, you might not like everything they have to offer. For example, their copywriters might not be specialized for tech topics or familiar with jobs in web3. In that case, the best solution is to hire a freelancer for your content writing needs. This way, you will have a dedicated team of professionals for marketing efforts, and a writer who crafts well-informed and accurate articles.
Marketing is not the only thing you can outsource — you can also let someone else deal with:
- Data analytics outsourcing
- Customer Service outsourcing
- Accounting outsourcing
- Administration / Bookkeeping outsourcing
- Human Resources outsourcing
Let’s Recap!
There’s no point in tormenting yourself with tasks you have no time and skill for, and which other people can handle expertly.
To boost your productivity, choose to automate or outsource some workload. You can dedicate that time to something that makes you stand out. This way you’ll reduce stress, manage your time better, and keep growing as a professional.
About the author:
Stefan Smulders is a SaaS Entrepreneur
Founder of the World's safest software for LinkedIn Automation – Expandi.io
For more than 5 years Founder of LeadExpress.nl.
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