Whether you work at home, in an office or somewhere else altogether, chances are you could afford to spend less time on your day-to-day tasks. In today’s fast-paced business world, time is always of the essence, and offices are much more likely to be short-staffed than to have extra people looking for things to do. Fortunately, technology is wonderful for saving time on virtually any task, whether it’s mundane or more complicated. Streamline your workflow with a few of these tech tips.
Letter Templates on Outlook’s Developer Tab
One of the best ways to save time during work is to reduce the number of keystrokes it takes to perform a task. This is why it’s important to write form letters for common situations and save them for later use. Microsoft Outlook makes it easy to store me access letter templates. Just save letters in the “Personal Forms” library of the developer tab, and next time you send a message you’ll only have to fill in a few fields.
Mail Merge
If you’re sending a letter to a number of people, using Microsoft Word’s mail merge feature can save you hours. You can use the program for e-mails as well as physical letters. For example, if you work for a pest control company, you can use mail merge to send promotions about your best rat poisons to only your most valued customers.
To send a mail merge, begin by typing the letter in Microsoft Word. Then locate the Excel spreadsheet that contains customers’ information such as name, e-mail and street address. Set a greeting line and/ or address block in Word, and match the fields to the spreadsheet. Mail merge will then populate the fields for you.
Adobe Dreamweaver
If you have much experience with writing codes for websites, you know its takes a significant amount of time to write and customize a page. With Dreamweaver, features like Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and Spry widgets can save you hours of coding. Before you post a new page online, Dreamweaver can even check your code to ensure it displays correctly.
Cloud Servers
When you work from multiple devices, you can spend a lot of time transferring your files from place to place. If you save your work on a cloud, though, your documents and spreadsheets will automatically sync to your devices. That means you can access the latest versions of your work anytime and anywhere.
Cloud servers are also great for project collaboration. You can share the account information with everyone working on a project, and each of you will be able to view and edit the files.
HootSuite
Do you find yourself spending a lot of your workday updating all of the social media pages for your company? If so, you may want to consider using HootSuite, a platform that allows you to update all of your social media accounts simultaneously. There is a monthly fee for using HootSuite, but most users find the price to be very reasonable considering how much time it saves.
