Never Enough Time? 5 Key Professional Processes To Automate

By Geoff McQueen, CEO, AffinityLive

The last 10 years have brought endless new technology into our personal lives. We no longer use maps, phone books, or disposable cameras because smartphones have automated these tasks to require little more than the click of a button on our iPhones. But, while smartphones have made us more connected, it often seems like our workload has gone up — why haven’t we taken advantage of technology to automate our work in the last decade too? While we’re working at a faster pace, professionals have generally done a poor job of using technology to automate and eliminate manual and administrative work. The good news is that you can use technology to automate a lot of the things you do at work each day — here’s a list of five great things technology can now do for you.

1. Data Entry. This is a case where technology has actually “created” work; how much time are we expected to spend filling out CRM (customer relationship management) databases, timesheets, and all manner of other technology? In tech we have a saying, “garbage in, garbage out,” so any of these systems that have poor quality or out of date data are frustrating and not very useful to us. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be that way. We’ve seen clients saving more than a dozen hours a month by automatically importing their emails into the CRM, filling in their timesheet automatically based on the email and calendar activity, and even dynamically learning and growing their CRM databases when a new client contact sends or received an email for the first time. Aside from the time saving of doing this automatically, the quality of information improves dramatically because it doesn’t rely on us imperfect humans to be disciplined and perfectly thorough.

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