Productivity aside, running a small business can already feel like juggling ten dozen tasks at once while riding a unicycle. And that’s usually true for most, except for the organizations that do manage to nail down their productivity. Between managing day-to-day operations, client work, and long-term strategy, it’s easy for things to slip through the cracks.
Fortunately, the right tools can help you streamline processes and boost productivity. Here are seven areas of your business that can be made simpler with a dedicated tool.
1. Use a Task Management System
Your organization’s ability to manage and delegate tasks is a cornerstone of its efficiency. While communicating and organizing details in Word docs and emails is fine, it can lead to poor prioritization without help.
Adopting a task management system can save your organization mountains of time by allocating what actions happen when. Think of them as the ongoing agenda for your entire business. They keep tasks on track and help keep everyone in the loop on what’s happening. The best part is there are dozens of great task management systems out there. Systems like Trello, Asana, ClickUp, and ActiveCollab all have free versions you can try out, each providing different strengths.
2. Choose an Accounting Software
Financial management is often a significant source of stress for small businesses. Many businesses will resist using dedicated software and insist on managing everything from an Excel spreadsheet, but this is ripe for disaster if handled ineptly. Investing in accounting software can take much of the headache out of financial management, especially for small teams.
Accounting software often serves multiple areas, like payroll, expense tracking, invoicing, and taxes. With tools like these, you can free up time in your business to focus your resources on big-picture things that matter most.
3. Keep Communication in One Place
While task management systems can help organize big and small to-do’s, there is also a need for strong communication vessels. Having systems like Slack or Microsoft Teams can help keep people collaborating and staying on track with projects. The nice part is that communication software can be versatile and useful for real-time collaboration and asynchronous teamwork.
The thing to anticipate with communication is that it can happen in many different places. People can email, direct messages, phone calls, Zoom, and talk in person. Many details can fall out of place with all the various avenues people can use to communicate. When critical information is spread across five different touch points, it can make staying organized a nightmare.
To prevent this, ensure that information essential to a specific task or initiative is tracked in a space where everyone can access it. If progress toward a big project is made over Slack messages, make sure to transfer the record of that progress into your task management system. Choosing a source to be the “home base” of your work will make correlating things much easier.
4. Track Time and Measure Productivity
Time tracking can reveal a lot about your business’s productivity. Making a concerted effort to understand how time is spent in your organization can help you realize what needs improvement. Surprisingly, the average worker is only productive for less than three hours each day.
For one reason or another, time can be wasted, spent poorly, or used on the wrong things. A timekeeping tool like Toggl or Clockify can help your brand itemize how people spend their time. You may uncover patterns where people spend more time in meetings than completing critical work. You’ll also be able to determine inefficiencies in worker output based on how long it takes them to complete tasks. Doing so can give you a clear perspective on how people spend their time.
5. Simplify Scheduling and Appointments
Coordinating your meeting schedule can easily eat up a lot of your day, especially when you’re stuck going back and forth, trying to find a time that works for everyone. Not everyone can afford an assistant to handle these administrative tasks either. Without the right system in place, it’s easy to waste hours on the logistics of planning instead of focusing on your core work. That’s why having a scheduling tool will shift the scales in your favor. It helps you structure your weekly schedule to avoid all the confusion and time-wasting of managing appointments manually.
Tools like Calendar, Calendly, and Reclaim.ai make it easy to share your availability and allow you to prioritize when you’re open for meetings and when you need uninterrupted work time. These tools sync directly with your calendar, ensuring everything is up-to-date and avoiding double bookings.
Plus, they give you control over your day by letting you block off specific times for focused work, preventing any distractions from cutting into your productivity. If you use them to set the right boundaries, they can also help you achieve work/life balance.
6. Secure Your Credentials With an Encrypted Password Vault
If your brand handles a lot of accounts online, chances are you have a password book or spreadsheet buried somewhere in a drawer or on someone’s computer. Not only is this horribly risky for security purposes, but it’s also incredibly inefficient. What your business ought to use, in this case, is a dedicated password vault.
These encrypted tools provide heightened security for your online profile credentials. And, just as importantly, they allow you and your team to navigate and log in to online accounts faster. The best tools of this ilk you’ll want to consider are Keeper, LastPass, and 1Password. These do a great job at sealing and protecting your book of passwords while also allowing personnel access to passwords they would need.
7. Record Meetings and Ask ChatGPT for Meeting Summaries
If you use AI in combination with meeting recordings, you’ll never have to take manual notes from a meeting again. There’s an abundance of meeting recording software out there, such as Gong and Fathom, to name a couple. These are perfect for recording a meeting, which, from one angle, already eliminates the need for repeat meetings.
Aside from saving everybody from repeating the same information, these tools will also provide automatically generated transcripts of recorded meetings. Beyond that, some will even call out critical highlights from meetings and action items for specific people to do. You can take this to the next level by extracting transcripts from your conferences and tossing them into ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity AI.
Then, you can simply ask the generative AI tool of your choice to process the transcript and pull out the most important highlights. You can further define it by asking for specific action items related to you or another teammate. This can save a ton of time and make the aftermath of the meeting more productive, especially if you manage a remote team.
Quit Spinning Your Wheels
Unfortunately, productivity doesn’t come naturally to most people. We tend to veer off course and focus on things we shouldn’t. It’s not always deliberate, but it’s an issue nonetheless. Introducing tools like the ones above can help minimize distractions, streamline processes, and strengthen the overall work quality of everyone in your business tenfold.
Give them a shot, and watch your team’s efficiency soar.
Featured Image Credit: Photo by Alena Darmel; Pexels; Thank you.
Deanna Ritchie
Editor-in-Chief at Calendar. Former Editor-in-Chief and writer at Startup Grind. Freelance editor at Entrepreneur.com. Deanna loves to help build startups, and guide them to discover the business value of their online content and social media marketing.