Have you ever missed a crucial deadline or important meeting that ended up costing you more than just the embarrassment that comes from being unorganized?
With so much busywork happening all at once, this is nearly inevitable - unless you’re using a smart automation platform.
In order to meet every deadline and prevent yourself from losing valuable clients, follow these ten tips that'll help you stay on track and focus on the work you love:
Continuously delivering outstanding projects is a challenge in and of itself, so staying organized is key. This means allocating some time in your busy schedule to clean-up shop to prevent important data from falling through the cracks. First and foremost, you should get rid of any disconnected tools that are hindering your team's productivity and eating up time that could be spent doing client work.
This means making sure that you, your team, and your clients are always on the same page when it comes to the status of a certain project. How? Invest in a smart platform that can sync and store all of your client-related communication in one place for everyone to access. This way, everyone is kept in the loop whenever a deadline needs to be changed - and you won’t have to send bulk emails to notify everyone individually.
You'll never miss another deadline with a smart platform that lets you set reminders or triggers whenever a due date is approaching, or if a project is starting to go off track - nice!
Stay on track with a cloud-based platform that automatically updates a project's deadlines as your workload changes. With the benefits of a real-time utilization dashboard, you'll also be able to see who in your team is working on what (and when), so that you can alert your clients if there’s been a change in pace and ultimately avoid scope creep.
Stop wasting time jumping between various tools and tabs and start using an automated smart platform that brings together all of your clients, data, and projects in one place. This is called service operations automation, and it's the only way you’ll be able to focus on the task at hand while technology takes care of everything else.
Automatically track all the time you spend doing client work, and easily convert it into billable hours. This way you don't have to try to find time to work on your billing and invoicing at the end of the month when you could be working on critical tasks - because all of it will be done for you, automatically.
No matter what your deadline is, try to take a break to refuel and refresh! Studies have shown that four in five office workers opt to stay at their desk to have lunch - which is actually doing more harm than good. While you might think that leaving the office is preventing you from reaching a deadline, it’s actually doing the complete opposite by stunting your creativity. Something as simple as a quick conversation with a colleague or watching a 10-minute video online is enough to increase productivity - so go on, take a break.
In order to meet your deadlines, you have to put client work first - but what happens when an important meeting suddenly pops up and you’re left juggling too many tasks? With a team scheduling feature, you’ll be able to see (in real-time) what your team members are working on and reassign your excess work to them. Problem solved.
This could be something as small as a tea break or an early mark - just a simple incentive that will keep you working towards your goals. When it comes to bigger projects, you might even consider taking your team out for lunch if they manage to complete their work in record time.
If you happen to miss a deadline, don’t beat yourself up about it. Write down what went wrong, analyze the problems, and understand how to avoid it in the future.
Remember that an automated smart platform will help you meet every deadline, and also highlight exactly where you could be doing better so click here to try one for free today.
