3 Business Tools to Boost Productivity in the Office

While large corporations have enough people to deal with inefficiencies and survive the performance lag for long periods of time, small businesses don’t have the same luxury. Being more proactive by helping employees become the picture of efficiency with their work time is a critical aspect of business administration and managing employees well. Only with staff making the most of their time can the company outperform larger competitors in the marketplace while lightening the load for the management team.

Here are three business tools that will surely do wonders for staff productivity.

Automate for Predictable Results

There are many tasks that are repeated in a business on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly basis. The difficulty is in keeping track of all the things that must be attended to. Simple matters like keeping up with industry subscriptions, online SAAS payments, and renewing software licenses for the correct number of users are important but easy to overlook.

Tools like Wunderlist or Remember the Milk are useful to business administrators and managers who have a long list of tasks to remember to perform that are easy to forget. Wunderlist is a basic To-Do list manager that lets you assign dates and responsibilities to individuals, along with tagging and marking which items are urgent. Remember the Milk is in many ways even more powerful because it’s possible to create custom tasks lists that fit into a specific criterion, such as any tasks that mention “licenses” or “software.”

Reduce Unnecessary Distractions

Distractions are the bane of knowledge workers who are working to a deadline and must get certain things done on time. One aspect of this which was previously difficult to manage was mindlessly surfing when there’s work to be done. One way to prevent this is to use a web browser extension or add-on like StayFocusd, which gets added to your Chrome web browser and blocks different types of web activities. These can be customized to include the usual suspect web sites that drain more time than anything, e.g. Facebook, image hosting web sites, etc.

There are many other similar software tools to remove access to part of the web to save time. Every web browser has their own versions, which can be installed. It saves people from distracting themselves with unnecessary time wasting when they should be getting things done.

Manage Email Better

Email is a time drain than often costs over two hours per day reading and replying to messages. By using tools like Boomerang for Outlook and Boomerang for Gmail, you can use your inbox more productively to send requests and have the message thread only return to your inbox within a certain period of time.

Alternatively, Inbox Pause is a tool that prevents new email from arriving and being seen in your inbox until after you’re ready to see it. Such a tool is useful for busy people who know that the best careers in business management are achieved by the most productive people. To learn more about how to build a valuable career in business, you might want to consider an online management degree.

For anyone who is career minded and wants to advance up the ranks, productivity and not wasting time with busy work and mindless time-wasting is the first thing to tackle. Ruthless efficiency ensures that you’ll be more productive than colleagues and looked upon favorably by senior management.