Time Management Tips

Your New Hire Checklist

Hiring a new employee is a big accomplishment in any small business, and there are a lot of steps involved, too. Here’s a handy checklist to help you stay organized when you bring that new hire on board. 

First things first, the legal and accounting items:

  • Signed employment agreement, typically an offer letter. There may also be a supplemental agreement outlining employee policies.
  • Payroll documents include:
    • IRS form W-4
    • Form I-9
    • Copy of employee’s government-issued ID
  • Most states require a new hire report to be filed; sometimes your payroll system vendor will automatically file this for you.
  • Notify your workers comp insurance carrier.

Next, it’s time for employee benefits enrollment:

  • Health insurance
  • 401K
  • Any other benefits you provide
  • Provide the employee with the holiday schedule
  • Explain their PTO and vacation if not already explained in the offer letter

Set your new employee up for success with the right equipment:

  • Desk, chair, lamp, other furniture
  • Uniform
  • Tools
  • Coffee mug, refrigerator shelf
  • Phone
  • Truck, keys
  • Computer, monitor, mouse, keyboard, power strip, floor mat
  • Office keys, card entry, gate remote, parking assignment
  • Filing cabinet, keys
  • Tablet
  • Forms
  • Office supplies
  • Cooler, other supplies

Your new employee may need access to your computer software systems:

  • Employee email address
  • Any new user IDs and password for all the systems they will need to access
  • Document access

How will your new employee learn the ropes?

  • Set up training
  • Assign a buddy

Hopefully, this list will give you a start toward making your employee onboarding process a little smoother.

Your Perfect Work Day

How well do you love the way you spend your typical workday?  What would a typical workday look like if you had absolutely no constraints?  Here’s a fun exercise to get you thinking about your future and how you can make small changes in your current day to move it toward your ideal day. 

Get comfortable and begin jotting out what your ideal day looks like.  Start with what you do before you get to work.  How do you start your day?  With a workout or breakfast or something else?  What does breakfast consist of?  Where are you eating?  What do your surroundings look like?

How do you get to work? What is your commute like? List the sights, sounds, smells.  Once you get to work, what do you do first? Will you spend time on the phone?  With whom?  At the computer?  Do you go somewhere?

Do you get a nice break for lunch? Write it all down in detail, and continue until your post-workday routine.  Who are you with?  Where are you?  What do you do?

Here’s a partial sample:

“Lunch with my two friends at our favorite Mexican restaurant on the beach. We laugh a lot, share stories, and part with hugs and handshakes. After lunch, I work on my favorite work project, which challenges me to think about how to help my employees gain new skills. While I work, I listen to my favorite music CD.  In a few hours, I am ready for a stretch break and walk outside to water the plants. After break, I return calls, talking with my clients and catching up on how to best serve them.   …”

OK, now it’s your turn.  Here are some questions to consider while you do this exercise:

  • What’s important to you to spend time on?
  • What’s enjoyable that you would really like to have as part of your daily routine?
  • What activities will give you a nice balance of accomplishment, relaxation, and socialization, even during work?
  • What do you need to include in your ideal day to get your needs met?

Change One Thing

Getting to your ideal day can take time.  Don’t try to change your whole routine all at once.  What one or two things can you pull out of your ideal work day description that you could bring into your current work day to brighten it with happiness?  In the description above, this person might block out time to find employee training, go out for lunch instead of eating at her desk, make a new playlist, delegate tasks that are not part of her ideal day, or take more time when returning client calls.

Make gradual changes in your current day to improve it.  With each change, you’ll be moving toward the realization of your ideal day. And if your ideal day doesn’t include bookkeeping but your current day still does, we’re here for you.

Do You Spend Too Much Time on Email?

If you feel like you spend too much time on email, you’re not alone. Almost everyone feels the same way. That’s why it’s so important to learn how to be as productive as possible when it comes to handling email. Here are five tips to help you do just that.

1- Automate your emails.

If you’re sending a lot of the same emails to clients, you may be able to add them to email list management software like Constant Contact or MailChimp. Then you can automate a series of emails using the autoresponder function.

Another way to automate your emails is to set up inbox rules so that certain emails are automatically filed into the folders you’ve set up. For example, if you get a monthly email for a recurring bill payment, you could send it straight to your bills folder if you don’t want to read it. This will save time in the morning when you sort through the pile of email that’s sent overnight.

2- Set a timer.

Make a habit of checking your email only once or twice in the day. Plan those times on your calendar and set a timer to stop if you need to. This employs time batching, one of the most productive ideas in time management. It’s unproductive to stop and read each email exactly as it comes into your box, so setting times restructures the way you work with email for the better.

3- Create draft email answers of your ten most frequently asked questions.

Do you get a lot of the same questions over and over again in your email? Don’t start from scratch each time you craft an answer. Start with a draft of a previous answer, make it generic, and save it in your drafts folder. When you get that question again, copy and paste the draft and customize it as necessary.

Repeat this for your top ten (or twenty) most-asked questions or emails that you send. You’ll shave minutes off each email reply from now on.

4- Learn the email software you’re using.

Sure, everyone pretty much knows how to send, reply to, and forward emails. Most even know how to add attachments. But what else do you know and use on a regular basis?

If you are tech-savvy, then simply spend some time reviewing your email settings and functions. There may be some you discover that will make your day.

If you don’t feel very comfortable with all things technical, then sign up for a formal course, preferably in person, where you have a real human teacher that can answer all your questions. It will be a day well spent.

5- Set up folders.

Folders, labels, or categories in your email software are all good ways to segment email so that it can be processed in a particular order. Your folders might be by priority, client, service type, or something else. In any case, it’s easier on your brain to answer all questions from one client or topic at a time than it is to ping-pong back and forth.

Use folders when you are complete with an email but want to save it for future reference. That way, your inbox will stay cleaner and emptier.

6- Use the search function.

Using the search function liberally in your email software when you need to find an old email will help you save tons of time.

7- Get a new email address if your current email address is too spammy.

You may be losing the spam battle with email addresses that have been used for more than a few years or that have been hacked. If so, the best solution might just be to switch to a new email.

Choose a good email address in the first place by staying away from email addresses that hackers can guess, like webmaster@yourdomain.com, sales@yourdomain.com, or info@yourdomain.com. Instead use service@yourdomain.com or a version of your first and last names.

Try these email productivity tips to help you spend less time on email while still getting the job done.

Browser Productivity Tips You May Not Know

If you spend a lot of time online using a web browser to view web sites or to work in online applications, then you may benefit from knowing these wonderful features about your browser software.

Bookmarks

All browsers support bookmarks, and hopefully you are already using this powerful feature. Which web pages do you need to visit on a daily basis? Those should be ones that have a place on your browser’s bookmark bar. Look for your browser menu to find the bookmark commands you can use to set them up.

Avoid bookmarking your bank, brokerage, and credit card web pages for security reasons, but most everything else is fair game and will save you a lot of time.

Browse Incognito

Need to browse privately?  Many browsers offer incognito browsing which disables browsing history and the web cache. Find this command in your browser menu.

People

Roughly two-thirds of the population use Google Chrome as their browser, and the People feature is unique to Chrome. If you have a situation where you have multiple accounts with one software provider, Chrome allows you to have an entirely separate browser session going on for each person.

Let’s say you’re a social media consultant and manage the Facebook accounts for ten clients. You can set up a “person” in Chrome, one for each client. You then can have ten browser sessions going for each of your clients without having to log out and log back in to each Facebook account.

Do you volunteer at a nonprofit where you manage accounts for them? Set them up as a new person, and you can log in to all of their accounts without impacting yours.

Pretend that different departments of your business are separate people. Set up Accounting as a person in Chrome and log in to all of your accounting apps. Or set up Marketing as a person and log in to all your marketing and social media apps using this person.

Set up a different bookmark bar for each person, pouring rocket fuel on your time savings and decluttering you bookmark bars at the same time.

Set up a new person using the Manage People section in Settings.  Toggle between People by using the button on the tab bar at the top right of your screen just to the left of the Minimize command.

Extensions

Many browsers have extensions or plug-ins which expand the functionality of the browser. Here are couple of favorites.

  • Gmail Offline – allows Gmail users to view their email when they don’t have an Internet connection.
  • AdBlock Plus – tired of ads popping up? Get this extension to thwart them.
  • Momentum – provides a customized, motivational dashboard with weather, time, and daily to-do items.
  • Pocket – allows you to save articles and other content to read later or on your other devices.

Many of the software apps you use every day also have Chrome extensions you can use. Pinterest, Evernote, your anti-virus software, Hootsuite, and others have extensions you can check out and install.

Try these tips to learn your browser software better and become more productive while navigating the web.