Life as a founder is hard enough as it is with the difficulty in balancing bigger picture strategy with operational tasks. It’s even harder if you have a small team, that you need to coordinate, partners and funders to please and customers to thrill with your offering. So how can founders cut down the time that some of the operational and coordination functions take, whilst boosting productivity and effectiveness?
Here are three platforms that have transformed the way we can do business. An important common link is that they all save you time and cut down on unnecessary emails too.
Email has recently been described as “knowledge pollution” by business expert Associate Professor David Burkus. Burkus notes that 23 per cent of the average employee’s workday is spent on email with approximately 112 emails sent or received.
1. Slack
Slack is a great way to cut down on unnecessary emails and to carefully group your communications under relevant #’ed threads. It is like an instant message board for your business that you can use to share ideas, allocate tasks, coordinate work and plan action. You can think of it like internal Twitter just for your team.
2. HootSuite
HootSuite is a game changer when it comes to managing multiple social media accounts and getting content regularly posted on your key social channels. HootSuite allows you to schedule content posting, optimise posting times, channels and to save time in crafting quality posts. It now supports Instagram as well as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
3. WhatsApp
For small teams of 4-12, WhatsApp is just brilliant as a means to share or broadcast short information bytes, links to other relevant content and to make arrangements with your team. WhatsApp is a great way to schedule things, send reminders and to check in on your team. It’s also a great way to build team cohesion and social glue that elevates performance and unity around a shared purpose.
Integrating any one of these platforms into your work life will save you a great deal of time and energy, particularly on the less important tasks, that already consume far too much of our workday. I would suggest adding them into your communications mix over time, tracking productivity gains and building incrementally toward a more efficient process.
Mike Davis, Founder, Purposeful
