Time Management: Turning Your Computer Into An Employee! Using Software to Automate Tasks and Free Up Your Time!
April 11th, 2007 by 
Chris Pangburn
If you run a small business then I’m sure you’re aware of all the day-to-day tasks that eat into your time and hence your bottom line. A 5-minute email here, a 10 minute application form there, before you know it these tasks mount up and you’re spending a third of your time on administrative tasks. If you were in a large organisation then it is likely that you would delegate to an employee, but why spare that expense when you can delegate some of these tasks to your computer, and they don’t even argue back!
Stop Paying Your Inbox More Time Than Your Customers
Unsolicited bulk email, or spam as it is commonly known, plagues the majority of internet users nowadays. If you are a business then even more so, as you have probably listed your email address online in a variety of places. Not to be pessimistic, but over time the problem will only get worse as more and more rogues get their hands on your email addresses. If you’re regularly having to sift through inbox to manually filter out spam then it’s time to look for a better spam filter or email service! Ideally you want a filter that can ‘learn’ and teaching it is as simple as clicking “Report spam” when a spam email slips the net. That way it will adapt its filter and become more effective in keeping your inbox clean. We provide Microsoft Exchange 1Gb and 2Gb email hosting packages which have effective spam filters – please contact us for more details.
Forever Filling In Forms?
If you’re the type of person who’s always doing a million things at once, and having to sign up for dozens of things every week then you’re also probably spending way too much time entering your personal details over and over again. Many online registration forms require much of the same information (eg: name, address, phone number etc..), and so there are applications out there that can do the legwork for you. RoboForm is one such example which is a relatively inexpensive application and saves your ‘profile’ so that you can get it to enter all your information at the click of a button. These programs are also extremely useful in link building campaigns, which require similar information to be entered repeatedly.
It’s A Date!
There are some tasks which we really should do every week, or daily if you prefer! Data-saving tasks such as full virus and spyware scans together with full system backups should be performed regularly. The importance of creating regular backups of your work onto CD, DVD or an external hard-drive really shouldn’t be underestimated. It’s probably happened to all of us when we’ve been writing an article or document for hours, only to later discover much to our dismay that it didn’t actually save. Backup programmes (and even external hard-drives) can be bought quite cheaply, and many antivirus and backup utilities come with a scheduler installed. Rather than having to manually run a virus scan or backup it would save time and be more efficient to set the scheduler to run at a certain time every week (or day) – don’t forget to also have your antivirus program set to automatic updates.
Part 2 Will Follow On Tomorrow…
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