If you run a business, then you should constantly be looking for ways to improve your workflow and to automate and systemize as many aspects as possible. This is what’s referred to as ‘biz systemization’ and there are several reasons that it’s such an important idea. Read on and we’ll explore them in some more detail.

You Get More Freedom
If you are currently putting in late nights at work and feeling as though you’re not getting the results you deserve, then that suggests that your business isn’t capable of operating without you. By improving the ability of your staff to work independently and putting systems in place, you’ll find your ‘hands on’ time is reduced and as such you can spend more time with your family, travelling or enjoying your hobbies. And isn’t that the point?

You Save Time and Money and See Improvements
Often systemization basically means introducing flow charts and checklists that automate the processes that make up your company’s workflow. By using these systems you ensure that you use the same efficient method for every new job and every new client. This is important because it in turn means that every client and customer will be equally satisfied and will know they can rely on you for a certain quality of service.
Moreover, having systems in place means that you can then assess those systems and find ways to improve them. Once you know the exact checklist your team is following, you can look into slightly altering that checklist and seeing how that impacts on your profits, your overheads and your ratings. If you are all over the place though and you attack each problem in a different way, you’ll never know how to improve.

You Can Expand
If you are dealing with issues as they arise then you will be working ‘in’ your business rather than on it. Instead, use systems and you can take a ‘step back’ from everything and gain the time and perspective to actually improve your business model. Meanwhile, extra efficiency will allow you to spend less time on each job thus meaning you can afford to increase the number of jobs you perform and thus your turnover and profits.
In short, systemization is the answer to many business woes and can make a huge difference to your efficiency, happiness and growth. It’s time to apply some systems thinking!

No matter what kind of business you run, IFTTT is an incredible app that can likely help you to get a lot more done a lot more efficiently. While it has been around for a little while now, it’s still only just starting to gain popularity, so there’s a good chance you won’t have already heard of it and won’t yet be taking advantage of what it has to offer.
Read on and we’ll look at how IFTTT works and why it’s such a boon to your productivity and to your business as a whole.

What is IFTTT?
IFTTT stands for ‘If This, Then That’ and essentially allows you to set up interactions between your various different online accounts. What this means is that you can make it so that an event occurring on one account becomes a ‘trigger’ for something else happening on another.
The most basic example of this would be to set up a relationship (called ‘recipes’) that fired when you uploaded a post to Facebook and then just tweeted that same post on Twitter. Right away, this recipe could help you to save time on your social media marketing by meaning you have to update only the one account rather than two.
But the power of IFTTT goes much further than that because it also lets you work with Google Drive, Todoist, Gmail and much more, creating almost limitless possibilities.

The App
IFTTT began life as a web app but is today available for the phone too. This increases its potential list of uses exponentially by letting you link in the various features of your phone as well. For instance, you could text a certain number in order to tweet, or you could set up your phone to bring up your to-do list when you get home. You could even have it bring up your work e-mail as soon as you arrive at work!
Really though, the power of IFTTT is limited only by your imagination. Examples of the sorts of things you can do with it include: having e-mails added to your to-do list, saving various materials automatically to DropBox, or automatically populating Google Calendar.
If you’re looking for a way to automate a lot of the administrative tasks that you do on a day to day basis and you want a way to organize yourself and your information better to sign up for an account now!

One trait that a lot of programmers have in common is laziness.
Of course there’s something of an unflattering stereotype of programmers which tends to involve a gut and disheveled facial hair. But that’s not what we’re talking about here. Rather, programmers are lazy because they are constantly taking shortcuts.
In fact, did you know that the term ‘hack’ was originally used in a coding sense to refer to ‘inelegant’ coding solutions that got the job done? This in turn was what ultimately led to the ‘lifehack’ trend that is now sweeping the globe and it’s why so many of us are constantly looking for shortcuts and more efficient ways of doing things.
But what does all this have to do with managers and business owners?

Time to Hack Your Business
When a programmer finds themselves doing anything more than once, they will almost always end up writing a program to do it instead. Making long lists over and over again? Why not make a piece of code that will do it for you instead? You’ll invest more time up-front but ultimately you’ll never have to do that job again and you’ll save countless hours.
Using the same routine in a piece of code over and over again? A programmer will write a ‘sub routine’ which they can ‘call’ at any time to perform that function on an automated basis. Even the structure of programming is built this way.
But it’s not really laziness, rather it is ‘efficiency’ and it’s ‘systems thinking’. Why would you spend lots of time doing the same thing over and over again when a program could do it for you? And especially when time equals money?
So how do you approach your business with this mindset? The solution is to start thinking about your business more like a system and to think about the smaller component aspects of your business as ‘microsystems’ that make up the whole.
Now you can treat it like code. Look at the jobs you are repeating most often. How could they be done better and more quickly to save you time and money? Likewise, how could you save yourself from making mistakes?
Sometimes, this will actually mean asking a coder to write you a piece of software to do what you previously had your team doing. In other cases, it will simply mean changing the order that work is done or introducing a new flow chart or checklist. Either way, everything can be made more efficient and thus save you time and money.

Finding the right project management app can sometimes be a headache. In theory, a project management tool or app can make life considerably easier for any business by keeping all open tasks in one place and providing an easy way for team members to stay updated and to collaborate.
The problem is that it’s very hard to find a project management system that is perfectly suited to your workflow. Every business is different and finding one piece of software that can be equally suitable for a writing agency as it is for a bricklaying company is always going to present challenges.
If you’ve looked at the big three apps (Trello, Asana, and Basecamp) and not had any luck, then you might be starting to pull your hair out. Before you go prematurely bald though, consider trying Smartsheet.

What is Smartsheet
While Asana is rather bland and text-heavy, and Trello is very visual and accessible, Smartsheet strikes a smart balance between user-accessibility and business-like power. What’s more, Smartsheet has the considerable advantage of looking very much like something we’re all used to using: spreadsheets.
Essentially Smartsheet is a spreadsheet. Here, you can organize projects into sheets and format them against a number of templates and outlines that are in-built. As with a real spreadsheet, you can also create your own templates and layouts to suit your specific needs if nothing is available.
Tasks are added to the spreadsheet, just as they would be in Excel, and you can then add due dates, expand and collapse columns, and add attachments.

Features and Extras
Smartsheet has some nifty features and extras, too. For instance, your project can be viewed as an interactive timeline, or it can be viewed as a calendar. Sharing the files is easy, too, and is as simple as e-mailing a link. You can assign editing permissions to specific users, and the spreadsheets look great on a mobile device.
The only downside is that, unlike Trello or Asana, there is no ˜free  version available. A trial lets you sample the system for 30 days, though, and plans begin at $14 a month afterwards, which is reasonable.
This is a powerful project management app that is accessible and powerful at the same time. If you’re struggling to wrap your head around these tools, then its innate familiarity might make it a good choice for you. Of course, there’s always the option to use an actual spreadsheet, too!

There is an art to creating deadlines that work. You want your deadlines to stick so that you can get more done, and be even more amazing than you already are. But, if you tend to underestimate how long something takes, or your skill at doing it fast, you may constantly miss deadlines that you set for yourself or that others set for you. Thankfully, there are ways to ensure that you can set deadlines that stick.

* Do Your Research – When you approach anything that needs deadlines set, don’t just look at the end result; look at the tasks that take up the work to get to the end result. Understand exactly what each step involves. Find out how long it takes other people to do the task. If you don’t, you can’t make a reasonable deadline.

* Test it Out – When you are asked to do something new and need to set a deadline, try out a small portion of the task to see how long it will take you so you can best make predictions on time. Remember that when someone else is asking you for a deadline or even suggesting deadlines; if they don’t know what it takes, they’re just pulling a date out of the air. You need to do better than that.

* Understand the Scope – Ensure that you ask the right questions about the project so that you know what the true scope is. For example, you’re a web designer and someone says, “How much does it cost to build a website?” That leaves a lot of questions unanswered. There is no way to make a deadline with that information.

* Start at the End – Every project has a final deliverable. Start with that deliverable and work your way through all the tasks that need to get done to reach that final deliverable. Make an outline for each project so that you know everything that has to be done. Some people find it useful to make a mind map for each project. Then you can take that and use it to set realistic deadlines that stick.

Link to mind map – http://creately.com/diagram-community/popular/t/mind-map

* Break Down Large Projects – There is much more to a project than the deliverable. There are steps leading up to the end product or end result. For example if you set a deadline to lose 50 lbs. and you decided you wanted to lose 1 lb. a week, you know that you need to burn an extra 3500 calories a week over your body’s needs in order to accomplish that. Now, what steps will that take? The same can be stated about a project like a website. First you need a domain name, then you need to pick colors, then you need to choose design elements, and so forth.

* Set Mini Deadlines – Once you break down a project into smaller chunks, set deadlines for those pieces of the project. Some things have to be done in a particular order, other things don’t matter. Knowing this helps with assigning and delegating tasks and setting deadlines for them too.

* Add a Cushion of Time – There is a law called Hofstadter’s Law which basically says that everything takes longer than you think. So, add in some extra time. Commonly people multiply the time they think it will take by 1.5. However, if you find you are not meeting deadlines, determine the factor you need for your deadlines. It might be two times your initial estimate.

Link to Hofstadter’s law – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstadter%27s_law

* Be Realistic – While you want to be impressive as a person, don’t try to do too much at once. Look at your entire schedule. Include free time, sleeping time, family time, alone time, eating, exercise, appointments and so forth into your schedule so that you can be realistic about how much time you have to work on any given project or part of a project.

Creating deadlines that stick is a process that requires some thought. But, once you get into the habit of making deadlines that stick, you’ll be able to get much more done each day. We tend to fill up our time with something – why not fill up your time with activities and actions that are designed to get things done?