Being an entrepreneur is a wonderful, liberating prospect that enables you to turn your back on the daily grind and carve out a niche for yourself in the business world. When you’re a sole trader (also called sole proprietor). You have total autonomy over your business practices. You have complete control over everything you do and when. While this may sound great at first, it also means that you have 100% accountability for how you use your time. And, lest we forget, time is money!
This isn’t an article about how you should assign yourself set working hours or set yourself up a home office so that you can remain productive and avoid distraction (although both are important), this is more about ensuring that your business practices are as time efficient as possible.
Let’s look at some common ways in which entrepreneurs find themselves wasting time, and what you can do to avoid them…
Trawling through emails
Many sole traders find that as their business expands, the volume of email correspondence they have to process quickly goes from tricky to unmanageable. When businesses reach a certain size; managing, searching and preserving email data becomes a Herculean task that can stretch even the best email servers. If you spend precious minutes trawling through archives to retrieve a specific message or passage of text then you should consider O365 email archiving. This allows you to crawl through various archives using email text and metadata to ensure that your data is secure and easy to navigate, giving you peace of mind and saving your precious time.
Going back and forth with collaborators
Even sole traders need to collaborate. If you’re still sending the same document to multiple recipients and then having to field multiple responses from numerous collaborators then you can save yourself a lot of time and effort by using Google Docs. Not only is it leaps ahead of MS Word in terms of UX and usability, it allows for quick and easy collaboration, too.
After you create a document or draft, you can grant access privileges to anyone in your circle, to whom you send the link, or the whole darned internet.
No longer will you have to spend valuable time attributing different notes and contributions for contributors. Google Docs allows you to see notes and changes made, and they’re even color coded so you know who’s made them!
Sharing links via email
If you’re sending out a link to a product or affiliate, you’re probably sharing it throughout your network via email. But what if you sent the link out as a tweet instead? Unorthodox? Absolutely! But, let’s face it, most every email inbox you know is chock full of clutter and spam, and most of us are far quicker to react to a Twitter notification than an email. Let’s not forget, as well that Twitter is just more fun and engaging than any email inbox.
What’s more is that Twitter can broaden your reach and visibility. Accompanying your link with an appropriate hashtag will help to share the link with the world, growing your reach organically at absolutely no cost to yourself.
