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Home » Business And Finance Articles » Automate Your Repetitive Home Business Tasks

Automate Your Repetitive Home Business Tasks

If you work from home then you know that your time is valuable. Creating ways to automate your home business can save valuable time or even provide you with more time to build your business. By pinpointing the things that take up the largest part of your time, you will be able to begin to find more efficient ways to complete your work.

Managing your email or communication is a great place to start. Whether it be simple emails or answering questions over the phone, you can become more efficient. Being in a situation where you have to tell people the same thing many times can become overwhelming; don't worry, you can easily lessen you workload.

If you are answering questions over the phone then make sticky notes of common questions and answers. If you're on the go then get one of those tiny spiral notepads. Instead of writing out detailed answers, just make a checklist of the things that you must say to your customer to answer the specific question. Once you spend some time doing this you will end up with most of your answers memorized; this makes it easy to find even better ways to handle your customer's questions or problems.

Perhaps email is where your redundancy is; email is even easier to deal with than phone communication. If you send email with the same type of information to each of your customers then you've got a lot of typing to do; let's make this easier!

Send an email to yourself â€" just like the one that you normally have to send out to your customer â€" make it perfect. We will call this email your 'template email'. Now, every time you have to send this type of email out, you already have a starting point.

Go to your inbox and find that 'template email' that you sent to your self. Scroll down to the very bottom; click and hold your mouse button and drag it up to the very top of your email. Let go of your mouse button when all of the text has been highlighted.

Now, click the edit menu at the top of your email program and choose 'Copy'.

Next, make a new email to your customer; it's getting so easy. Click where you would normally type your message and then go to the edit menu again; click paste.

WOW! That's all there is to it. Of coarse you need to change the contact info to your customer's info. Make any necessary changes to the text, give it a subject and click send! You can refine your 'template email' until you only have to change the customers name and contact info; creating efficient template emails will save your more and more time.

These same ideas can be applied to many other areas of communication. The next time you are communicating with a client and you realize that you are repeating your self, remember to automate! Small notes and templates will save you weeks in the long run; they work for me and they can work for you.

There, we eased some of your workload for today â€" and â€" forever!

Copyright © Chris Brown http://www.SuperiorIncome.com

And here is another random article you might be interested in...

Playing With Money - And Making More

Ready to start playing with your money? Not interested in complicated businesses or boring bank C.D.'s? Here are some methods that aren't quite a business because you can do them once, or just when you feel like it. Start small and the risk is small.

Loan Sharking

Years ago a friend got a good job when I loaned him $300 to buy the necessary tools. I charged a $6 per week loan fee (don't call it interest) until he paid in full. That's more than 100% annual interest, and yes, we're still friends. Check the laws in your area if you try this, and take collateral. I don't loanshark any longer, but in my early twenties I loaned as much as $2,000 at a time ($100/month loan fee), and only once was stiffed on a small loan.

Investing In Other's Expertise

John showed me several car magazines before I understood why an old fiberglass car was a good deal at $2,300. What's a Corvette? He convinced me to put up the money, and after a new transmission for $900, he sold the 1976 Corvette for $4,300, netting us $1,000. I took half the profit ($500) for putting up the money for the two weeks.

I've done this many times with friends who know cars but don't have cash. Incidentally, if I had paid a $50 cash advance fee and 18% interest to raise the money with a credit card, my profit would still have been over $400, and John did all the work. I love playing with money. Do you have any friends who know about boats?

Buying Estates

My wife and I met a couple who buy out estates, sell some of it at flea markets, then run the rest through auctions. They've made a living at this for years. After negotiating to buy a whole house full of stuff, thay load up their trailer. If they don't want to do the flea market thing, they auction everything on Sunday afternoon for a nice profit.

If you're a good judge of value and have an auction nearby, you could also do this with rummage sales. Offer $100 for everything, then auction it off piece-by-piece. An auction near us lets anyone in, with no fee to enter - just a 25% commission on anything sold.

Playing With The Casino's Money

When I worked the roulette wheel at a casino I saw many people foolishly writing down the numbers that came up. Their theories were mostly nonsense. Casinos welcome these players and even hand them the pen and paper.

One man, however, was actually scientific about it. He found a bias in the wheel, after "charting" it for more than 5,000 spins. A number pays 35 to 1, but one of the numbers, due to manufacturing imperfections or whatever, was appearing 1 in 27 spins, instead of the average 1 in 38 spins.

He bet $10 a spin, and he profited $80 for every 27 spins of the wheel in the long run, or about $100 per hour. Since the ups and downs are dramatic, this is not for the faint-hearted. Even though he made tens of thousands, I saw him lose as much as $700 in a night. Remember too that not all wheels have biases (the casino eventually replaced that wheel). Have you ever tried "card counting" in blackjack?...