Save Time at Work With These Time Saving Techniques

Spike Team
By Spike Team, September 03, 2021, 6 min read
Productivity

Technology was supposed to enable us to fall back to only work four hours a week, but the exact opposite has happened. Work follows us everywhere now. Siri can read your messages, so even if you’re in the shower, you catch up on what’s on your schedule. If you think of a task you need to do while you’re in bed, Siri can add a reminder for you. Unfortunately, we’ve all ended up busier than ever, with more work piling up.

 

The critical strategy now is finding ways to streamline your work using technology. Sometimes, no matter how focused you are, you are given more work than you can accomplish. It would help if you often had another hour or two to get everything was done that’s needed to meet your goals.

 

 

Understand What You Are Wasting Time On

Time is the one thing that money can’t buy more of, but you can find ways to eliminate things you do during the day that waste time. One of the key ways you can improve your time management skills to save time at work is to identify areas where you’re wasting precious moments that could be better spent on something else that would be more productive.

 

 

Unclear Communication

A simple but effective time-saving technique is to look at where unclear communication has caused conversations to go back and forth without resolving a problem. Communication is the foundation of our work and society, and digital communication has led to many people not communicating well.

 

Have you ever started working on a task but realized that you weren’t clear on the outcome or the objective? In those situations, you have to go back and ask the person who assigned the task for more clarification. If they’d clearly outlined the task in the first place, you’d already be done with it. Instead, you might find yourself wasting an hour of your day thinking about the task, trying to determine the scope, and eventually giving up and asking for help.

Ineffective communication can be caused by: 

  • Unclear instructions

    When someone doesn’t give detailed instructions and think through what kind of knowledge they have that you don’t, the instructions might make sense for them, but not for you.

  • Overdose of information

    When people send large amounts of email and create back and forth communication, it creates a waste of time as you must decipher what’s actionable in the threads.

  • Too many meetings

    Meetings are often a waste of time. People ramble without much direction. Most meetings could be handled by detailed documentation that everyone contributes to.

  • Cannot locate information

    When critical company information is hard to identify, it wastes time searching for things across shared folders, drives, etc. Essential company information should be readily available and searchable.

 

Repetitive Tasks

Regardless of the line of work you’re in, repetitive tasks are commonplace, but they shouldn’t be. Bots and automation services could quickly do the majority of repetitive tasks we do. However, by not automating tasks, you’re leaving yourself open to human error, wasted time, lost productivity, and boredom.

 

Services like Zapier and IFTTT can bring basic automation to businesses and save time.

 

 

Disconnected Employees

One of the challenges of remote employees is they can easily be disconnected from the rest of the team. Unfortunately, when people on your team feel siloed off from the rest of the team, they can become less productive and get less work done.

 

When employees are disconnected from their work, they’ll make more mistakes, become sloppy, and potentially become a security liability. In addition, phishing scams are rising in the age of remote work, so disconnected employees are considerably more likely to become security targets as they’ll be less vigilant.

 

 

How Spike Will Speed Up Your Workflow and Productivity Every Week

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Spike is a conversational email app that streamlines all of your work communication. It removes clunky headers, signatures, salutations and turns email into a simple chat app. It doesn’t stop there, though. It also includes collaborative Notes, a unified calendar for all your email accounts, Tasks, Video Meetings, and more.

 

 

Priority Inbox

Spike’s Priority Inbox keeps all your most important communications front and center, while automatically sorting less critical emails such as newsletters, promotional offers, and random invites into another Inbox, called ‘Other’ For when you have more time (and mental space). It keeps the clutter in the background, while the essential items stay in the foreground.

 

 

Email as Chat

Everyone loves using chat apps like WhatsApp and Signal, so Spike takes the best of those apps and brings them to email. In addition, Spike brings all the best chat features to your Inbox with read receipts, status updates, and more.

Voice Messages

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Asynchronous work is crucial for any remote team, and voice messages are an underrated part of the experience. Using Spike’s Voice Message feature, you can skip a meeting and give feedback and comments using your voice recording. You can record, send, and listen to Voice Messages right inside Spike.

 

 

Video Meetings

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Video Meetings are a vital part of Spike’s remote work strategy. With Spike Video Meetings, there’s no app or context switching. As a result, you can say goodbye to plugins, creating accounts, and logins. Instead, you can start and join Video Meetings without leaving your Inbox.

 

 

Project Management

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Spike becomes the perfect project management tool by combing Tasks, To-Dos, collaborative Notes, and more into a single app. You’ll always know the latest updates to your projects without needing to change apps. It’s a huge boost as a time-saving technique.

 

 

Real-time Online Notes

Spike includes real-time Notes that are collaborative. You’ll be able to create, edit, and comment on Notes with your entire team. All additions and edits to a Note are saved automatically and synced across all your devices. Better yet, each time a change is made to a Note, it pops right to the top of your Inbox feed to let you know an update is ready for your attention. Spike’s Notes include support for attaching images, PDFs, documents, and more, making it one essential place to manage project collaboration.

 

 

Everything in One Feed

Because Spike is a complete digital workspace, it includes everything you need to do your work in one feed. Once you finish with messages, Notes, and Tasks – you can archive them. Your feed will always include your latest tasks and messages, so it’s the only place you need to do your work.

 

 

Summary

By implementing all of Spike’s next-generation technology features, you’ll be able to speed through your work. If you’re wondering how to perform your tasks more efficiently – then Spike is the answer! Legacy tools aren’t meant for modern work, so you need a modern communication tool. We estimate that Spike’s tools will save you on average 1.6 hours per day, so by the end of the week, you’ll have an extra day of productivity. Ready to get started? Download Spike today!

Spike Team
Spike Team The Spike team posts about productivity, time management, and the future of email, messaging and collaboration.

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