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Time Management for Balanced Productivity

Widely considered a vital skill for workers, entrepreneurs, and anyone with a tight schedule, time management is something that many swear by. A recent study finally looked at the importance of time management for balanced productivity and analyzed whether or not the legendary practice could live up to its fame. The results showed that indeed people who practice time management benefited from work productivity. But, what else?

Benefits of  Time Management in the Workplace

The benefits of time management span beyond helping people complete tasks on time. Time management seems to be the holy grail of skills, from mental health and well-being benefits to physical improvements and career growth opportunities. 

Time Management Tips

1. May Ease Work-Related Stress

The results from the study showed that time management has an impact on overall well-being, with most participants reporting better life satisfaction. With almost 83% of the US workforce struggling with stress, teaching and adapting time management skills can help reduce burnout symptoms. 

2. Improves Quality of Life

Work-related stress often causes disturbances in workers’ personal life. Spending more time with the family might be challenging if you’re constantly trying to catch up with deadlines. Time management means you can finally plan effectively and end your workdays on time to find a better work-life balance. 

3. Increases Quality of Work

Time management helps reduce procrastination and improves concentration, which can help increase the quality of work. When you are less stressed about finishing all their tasks at once, you are more likely to focus better on the task at hand.

4. Helps You Make Better Decisions

Poor time management can lead to making last-minute decisions that might not be the best ones. When you don’t have the time to analyze a problem or work through a job, you’re more likely to make mistakes. Time management helps balance productivity and helps you take your time during the decision-making process. 

5. Promotes Productivity 

Lastly, time management helps with productivity. When you’re organized, structured, and have everything planned, you’re able to focus better on your entire day and workload. The best part about time management is that it increases productivity in a controlled and organized way, so you aren’t necessarily doing more work, but you are doing it more efficiently. 

How to Adapt a Time Management Strategy

Not every method of time management works for everyone. Some people like to use planners, and others prefer to keep an agenda or maybe a digital time tracker. Experiment with different time management strategies to see which one works for you. The goal is to prioritize important tasks, set time aside for “free will” or “leisure,” and organize your days ahead of time to prepare yourself for the day better.

–Geraldine Orentas is a writer from Happy Writers, Co. in partnership with other service providers

Importance of Marketing in Business

Marketing is a strategy that businesses do to advertise their businesses. Every business entity needs to understand such a strategy and how to employ it. Business sectors have been using marketing strategies. They even hire people knowledgeable in marketing to help them sell their products. On that note, how important marketing in business?

Marketing and its Importance to Business

There are many important things marketing can do for different business sectors. That is why many business establishments adopt many marketing strategies. Give yourself time to know the importance of marketing to your business.

Importance-of-marketing-in-business
  • Marketing helps to boost the sales

Marketing is one way to give information to consumers. This way, consumers will have a basic idea of what is your product all about. They will also know the benefits of buying your products. Marketing educates many people about a certain product. When people are well-informed about your product, your sales will increase.

  • Marketing creates revenue options

Marketing is a great help for many business establishments to create revenue options. It is when business sectors use different marketing strategies to increase business profits. One way to increase the profit is to reduce the product costs. This way many customers will buy the product.

Reducing the product costs will increase the number of potential buyers, thus getting more sales. It is better to gain smaller profits but consistent sales.

Another way to increase the revenue is to run media advertisements and promotions. It is the easiest way to make people know about your products.

  • Set better goals for your business

The success of a business depends on its goals and objectives. Marketing can help a business set its goals. By practicing some marketing strategies it will lead to the popularity of their brand. By this, it will motivate the company to maintain its reputation. They will now set clear goals and objectives for their employees to know their targets. These goals will also reach their consumers.

  • Build a Reputation for your Brand

Another benefit of implementing marketing strategies is to build a reputation for your brand. But it is essential to ensure you are giving outstanding quality and useful products to your target market. This way, you won’t only build an excellent reputation for your product, but also your brand.

  • Improves Decision-Making

When a company hires a market specialist, they will do everything to boost the sales of your products by making appropriate marketing actions. The first thing to consider in doing these activities is knowing your audience. When the company has known fully their audience, this will help them decide what lines and details they will create in convincing people to buy their products.

The company will gather different tag lines to choose from. Marketing will help them decide what fits and what works for the people.

Types of Marketing

Importance-of-marketing-in-business_part2
  • B2B Marketing

B2B Marketing is the term used for business-to-business transactions. They used this type of marketing strategy when a company sells goods or any other services to an organization.

  • B2C Marketing

B2C Marketing is another term for Business-to-consumer marketing. This is done when an organization sells its products to people. B2C marketing promotes the business through advertisements.

  • C2B Marketing

We also know C2B Marketing as Consumer-to-Business Marketing. It is the opposite of B2C Marketing. It is a marketing strategy when consumers give goods or services to a company.

  • C2C Marketing

C2C Marketing or consumer-to-consumer marketing is a strategy in which the consumers can have an interaction with their co-consumers. It happens when they share a common product or service. This business model enables a customer to transact business with another customer.  A good example of C2C marketing is OfferUp and let go apps.

The main objective of C2C is to establish good relationships by helping sellers and buyers. By this, it would be easier for the customers to find products at the same time benefit from it.

How Marketing Strategies Lead to Success?

Every successful business has a story of its marketing strategies. It is the marketing strategies that boost the success of the business. Marketing strategies may include promotions and advertising. It also deals with media relations. Marketing can promote a certain brand, product, and people.

Even though you provide quality goods and services, it can be useless when people do not know about it. One of the marketing strategies is by giving information to consumers. When people are fully aware of your product, it will help in increasing sales. Thus, it means success to the business.

Also, another benefit of marketing strategy is by building a good image for the company. When the company has maintained its reputation and pleasant image to the public, consumers’ trust will increase. This can lead to some companies or individuals investing in them.

Impact of the internet on Marketing

As the world continues to reach advancements in technology, businesses have used it to their advantage. They have used the power of the internet to promote and advertise their products. Using the internet is important in promoting one’s product. 

Information about a certain product can now reach many people of different countries using the internet. Consumers can also know a product using browsing on the internet. They can know everything about what a certain product offers.

There are also ways in how your business reaches people.

Bottom Line

Marketing helps businesses reach success. With the right marketing strategies, your business will continue to grow and develop. Finding the best marketing strategy for your business is challenging at first. This post will guide you to determine which marketing strategy will best fit your business and help you succeed. There is no single marketing strategy that will make you succeed overnight. Thus, it is best to do research and try some strategies for your marketing venture.

Author Bio:

Sunny Popli

Sunny Popli is the owner of SPOPLI Web Development He loves to learn and grow. His key interest areas are to learn and implement the latest & impactful ideas in the field of digital marketing. The SPOPLI Web Development & Services can help you create a friendly website to interact with your clients. This will help you in promoting your products.

10 Workflow Strategies to Improve Performance

Every business follows a certain workflow but what most businesses tend to overlook is the fact that these workflows can be improved and managed better.

A manager surely understands how certain factors such as costs, efficiency, better collaboration, etc. can change the game for them and help give better profits.

A streamlined workflow maintains a steady environment and gives out more fruitful results. That’s where Workflow Strategies come in.

Before we get onto the strategies to get better at workflows, let us understand the significance of Workflow Optimization.

Importance of Workflow Optimization

It cuts down on the tasks that are often overlapped and saves time for employees that can be devoted to other important tasks.

  • Cuts down on the Bottlenecks in the Process

Workflow Optimization brings in a standard process that is needed to be followed and thereby cuts down on all the impediments on the way, which ultimately improves decision making powers of the business and brings in more efficiency.

A Good Optimized Workflow lets the manager access the history of the whole process in place and manage data in the best way possible.

Now that you are fully aware of what Workflow Optimization would do for your business, let us get down to some of the best practices that you should adopt for better efficiency and higher profits.

10 Workflow Optimization Strategies that you should know to Improve Performance

1. Analyze the Ongoing Workflow Process and Identify Areas during the Process

The only way to go about bringing in an efficient system is by analyzing the current one.

Lookout for how the current process is helping you out, what may be the bottlenecks in the way that may be delaying the task completion.

Actionable tasks for you would be:
  • Communicate with your employees and get feedback from them to get a better understanding of the problems they may be facing.
  • Sit down and have a discussion with the team to find the solutions to their problems and optimize the procedure to create a better working environment around.

2. Streamline the process by Automating Routine Tasks Automation.

Automation is an underestimated tool. Most businesses lack efficiency because they do not use automation for routine mundane tasks. Processes can run extremely smoothly if you can find workflow automation software that can work together.

Some of the key areas where you can focus on automation in the process are — Assigning the tasks to the employees, setting deadlines for task completion, automating payroll information, etc.

3. Focus on Prioritizing Projects based on their Importance and Urgency

Believe it or not, your team’s working capacity gets adversely affected when you do not know well in advance as to what project you want your team working on.

This confusion leads to complications and results in compromising with the productivity of your employees.

 Actionable task for you would be:

One of the ways you can go about optimizing the workflows is by ranking your projects on their importance.

Once done, you can get down to breaking all the tasks required to be completed and then scheduling the tasks based on their importance in the process.

4. Visualize the process for your Team Members

Who likes a doc full of texts and figures?

We are guessing the answer to be ‘none’ and so should you.

Visual task sheets are more pleasing to your team members and are quite easy to understand and process. Workflows that are broken down and presented in terms of graphs and charts make an efficient way to lay it down for everyone to understand what they are required to do.

One of the ways you can go about preparing this visual mapping is by using Gantt Charts and process maps. These can be a little complicated to create on your own, but the market is full of project management software that can ease out the process for you by creating these charts on its own.

5. Master the art of linking the data to Master Data

Communication, tasks, deadlines, and every other important aspect of the workflow gets lost when there is no proper system wherein the data is managed. That is why linking all the important information as well as data to the master data proves to be effective and saves up on a lot of time that can be utilized effectively.

The master data should be such that it has all the information such as department names, budget details, task allotment, etc. and that information can be accessed by all the team members for better efficiency.

6. Always focus on Re-examining

Let your failures teach you a lesson. Any project comes with unforeseen risks and challenges associated with it, but when these challenges are not tackled well or when your workflow is not altered to take on these challenges, that’s when there is a failure.

One of the important things to do here is making an examination of your workflow every now and then – a part of your workflow. Examining from time to time lowers down the chances of unexpected problems that one may face in the process. That is how you can actually optimize your workflow.

7. Keep an eye on the Budget and Allocate Budgets Effectively

Budget Allocation is quite an essential aspect of the workflow. A project that can deliver upon the objectives of a project but cannot keep up with the budget allocation is quite a common example of project failure.

It is of utmost importance to keep all the costs in place, allocate effective budgets to different departments that probably would not need to be revised in the future. Since there are always hidden costs, there should be a plan to manage those by cutting off budgets from required areas.

8. Don’t Underestimate the power of Proper Training

Training can enhance productivity and efficiency of the team by a great amount. It is important to have adequate training processes in place to ensure that workers perform their jobs effectively. This involves streamlining training processes so that workers only receive the training they need.

To do this, you need to make sure that your team members are well aware of the task allocations and their role in the process. Once they do, inform them well in advance of the training schedule for them.

9. Make use of the Tools Available

Most companies are now using software available in the market to regulate their workflows and optimize their workflow management. No doubt, it is a great way to streamline the process if adapted by the team well, and it really multi folds operational productivity, but at the same time, it can be detrimental too if the software is not considered to cater to the required needs of the business well in advance.

Therefore, in order to choose the best tool for your organization, consider factors such as features, pricing, compatibility, etc.

10. Do not overburden Your Employees

Sometimes, while delegating tasks, one tends to overlook how much of the work is being delegated to each member, and that tends to overwork the employees. It is essential that each member is delegated an equal amount of work. If it’s not, then that adversely affects the efficiency of the team and disrupts the smooth workflow.

There are various tools available in the market that can do this task of delegating tasks efficiently based on member’s profiles. This, in turn, improves productivity and keeps the employees motivated.

Conclusion

As you can infer from the blog, a good Optimized Workflow in place has its own set of advantages such as better communication, consistency, and efficiency at the same time. Therefore, it is essential that you understand what all profits a great optimized workflow can reap for your business and get started on these techniques you just learned!

Author Bio:  

Sara Williams

Sara is a content writer at PeppyBiz, a platform that helps you automate routine processes into workflows in your Slow workspace through workflow builder software.

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Cogent Analytics, LLC is a business management consulting firm, with a primary focus to help small to medium size, privately held businesses achieve success and long term profitability. Cogent provides powerful solutions with integrity and transparency to privately-held businesses throughout the United States.

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