When thinking about managing your day-to-day work tasks, there are many common-sense approaches to that. Many, like Indeed, have blogs for tips to organize your day and work. Some of these tips are:
Keep a task list
Eliminate clutter on your desk
Manage your time
Take breaks
Don't do multiple tasks at once
Remove distractions
Automate tasks that you can
Prioritize your tasks
Organize your work by time
Work in "batches"
There are more ideas and tips that all revolve around these ideas. Teams discuss these ideas, and managers try to help guide workers to greater productivity by leveraging these ideas.
But what happens with these ideas? How do we make this happen?
Keep a task list – Do you clutter your monitor and desk with sticky notes? Do you use pads of paper in some manner? Do you use Outlook task lists? Do you use OneNote or something else like that?
Eliminate clutter – Do you neatly stack your papers? Do you use folders and dividers to organize? Do you take this idea digitally and create an enormous amount of Outlook folders to sort your emails?
Manage your time – How do you do that? Do you set an hour for this? And an hour for that? Do you know how long your tasks and processes take?
Take breaks – Ok, coffee is really important! How do you stop in the middle of something to take a break? Do you have to wait on breaks because you can't easily stop in the middle of a task when you don't know how long it will take?
Don't do multiple tasks at once – FOCUS! 😊 What happens when that important email you were waiting for comes in the middle of working on another task?
Remove distractions – Hmmm. Can you mute your phone? Turn email notifications off? Hang a "Do not disturb" sign on your cubicle or door?
Automate tasks that you can – What does that mean? Is this a lot of Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V? Do you make a lot of spreadsheets to "automate" the collection of data?
Prioritize your tasks – Are your priorities your manager's priorities? Or even the organization's priorities? Do you know what your department's priorities are with regard to your tasks? Who gets to set the priorities?
Organize your work by time – What happens if something takes longer than you thought it would? Do you simply do what you didn't get done the day before the first thing in the morning? Or do you put off tasks that are harder or longer until later?
Work in "batches" - Do you stack the paper up and start working through it? How do you define a workable "batch"? What happens if that "batch" takes too long or cannot be completed in the time you set for that "batch"?
So, to answer these questions, do you and your team meet to discuss obstacles and struggles? Do you try to time specific tasks to justify your concerns or express being overworked? And even try to reset expectations with your management? How do you convince a manager who does not perform your tasks how to fit expectations into these great ideas for more productivity? Or are you a manager who needs the answers to make your team more productive and successful?
Tromba Technologies has a couple of decades of experience helping organizations become more productive, more accurate, and even more profitable. TrombaAI (www.tromba-ai.com) is the automation platform built by Tromba using Kofax TotalAgility and Upland FileBound automation technologies to address all of these needs and outcomes that all organizations are looking for.
Let's quickly look at how TrombaAI directly addresses all of these performances and work management ideas.
Keep a task list – When managing your work and tasks in a process like a policy renewal process, why would you even need to keep or make a list? TrombaAI has a work queue that keeps all of your tasks in all of your processes right in front of you. You can filter the tasks by criteria that you set or your organization sets.
Eliminate clutter – To us, this means eliminating workarounds. TrombaAI can collect all the information you need to perform tasks even before you take the work. There is no need to print, copy & paste, or simply collect information that you need just to perform a task. It can all be waiting for you.
Manage our time – Do you need to know how long tasks take to manage your time better? TrombaAI can collect and measure any KPI (Key Performance Indicator). With Analytics, you can gain insight into how long "what" takes. You can know how long something has been sitting or aging in your work queue. And better yet, you can know how long something has been in the process life-cycle to head off possible SLA (Service Level Agreement) violations.
Take breaks – Take your coffee and lunch breaks! TrombaAI can safely and securely pause your task so that it is waiting for you when you are ready to resume working on it. You won't lose any work you have performed even if the task has not been completed.
Don't do multiple tasks at once – Let TrombaAI help you focus on your work queue. You will have all the information from different data systems, web lookups, from documents; all in front of you. So you won't need to get lost in the spreadsheet workarounds to collect data, get lost reading your MSN news when you meant to go look up a piece of information or get distracted by a different customer when looking up data in your Line of Business application. Do you need to email an escalation to your manager? There is no need to go to email since TrombaAI performs that task automatically. Everything you need will be there to simply get the task done quickly and accurately.
Remove distractions – If you are not scavenging for information to perform a task, that is one layer of distraction removed. Have you ever had to perform the same task repeatedly because of a phone call or a colleague asking a complicated question, and when you return the task, you can't remember exactly where you left off? TrombaAI keeps up with where you are completing tasks. Take the phone call and answer your colleague's questions. Know that you won't get distracted and will resume right where you left off with your tasks using TrombaAI.
Automate tasks that you can – This is a strength of TrombaAI since it is an automation platform. 😊 Retrieving pieces of information from anywhere for the purpose of automation and completing tasks is exactly what TrombaAI is and does for its users.
Automation technologies that are innate to TrombaAI are:
1) Process Orchestration,
2) Business Process Management,
3) Workflow,
4) Cognitive Document Capture,
5) Robotics Process Automation,
6) Process and Business Analytics,
7) Integrated Mobile Capture,
8) Inner/External Portal access,
9) Digital Signature,
10) Customer Communication Management, and
11) Systems and Data Integration
Prioritize your tasks – TrombaAI makes this a snap. If your organization has rules to prioritize work items, TrombaAI will automatically sort and prioritize your tasks in the work queue. If you need to prioritize oldest to newest, that can be automatic or on demand whenever you need that. Do you need to filter your work by customer to prioritize certain accounts? That, too, can be automatic or on demand. Are there other rules that determine priority? Like a dollar amount? Any rule can be used to prioritize tasks automatically in TrombaAI.
Organize your work by time – With TrombaAI Analytics, you and your manager can know how long tasks and processes take. With that knowledge, you can better arrange your day for specific tasks to better make sure all the important items are done on time and to get more completed in a day.
Work in "batches" - Do you work on multiple "things" in a day? Are you an underwriter that reviews applications, renewals, etc.? In this "are you," TrombaAI can have applications and renewals sorted so that you can work through all the applications in a "batch" and all of the renewals in a "batch". Or are you working with Invoices? Do you need to approve all of the high-dollar invoices and approve GL coding? TrombaAI can organize similar tasks into what some may call logic batches so that you work through all of them together. That will keep you from bouncing around to dissimilar tasks constantly and slowing you down.
That's a little of what Tromba AI can do for you, your team, and your organization.
Are you a Kofax TotalAgility customer?
Are you an Upland FileBound customer?
Or are you simply interested in an OnPremise automation platform? We can help you with all of this as well. Contact us by visiting www.trombatech.com or at sales@trombatech.com for more information.