OutSource to Improve Your Productivity

by Kathy Sparks

 

One of my favorite clients calls the work she gives me her "junk bucket." That's the stuff she hates to do and that's the stuff I love doing. What a great match!

But wait, some of the "Junk Bucket" stuff is really boooorrrrrring to complete; and repetitious, week in and week out. Sound familiar? One particular task was so boring that I could nearly take a snooze while doing it. I'm going to tell you about this project and I want you to keep in mind the tasks you do day in and day out. You have to think out of the box to apply your own situation to my experience.

Imagine this. Take information from emails, say for a certain product being sold and copy and paste about seven items into a spread sheet, put in some extra codes and send it off. Sounds simple enough, right? Until you have about 70 of the things to copy and paste, Let's see, that's 70 x 7 = 420 Control Cs and 420 Control Vs. Never fails, it takes about an hour or more to complete.

And then the light bulb went off....automate! But I'm not a programmer and furthermore, I don't want to be one. So, along comes PeakOneTech. In about eight hours they had a little program built that would do this task in 15 minutes, saving me and my client 45 minutes each week. That's 39 hours a year or $1365 a year. Think of it this way - 27 more hours to do other tasks for your clients.

And that's the story. I know, when we talk about "customized" programs, it sounds expensive, but you have to do the numbers. Say I was charging my client $35/hr. The program cost me $400. It will take about four or five weeks for the program to pay for itself.