These six tips from Ehsan Honary to help trainers work smarter come from a thread asking for technology-based time saving tips. Click on the link at the foot of the article to read some more suggestions.

There are many possible tips on time management and workflow which is something you need to work on continuously.

I have been specifically researching this topic and thanks to technology there are many areas we can improve on.

Here are some concepts:

1. Use a consistent knowledge management system, so you know exactly where a new piece of information has to go. For example set a mind map, or a use notes in Outlook, or Word document or whatever works for you as long as you know in two seconds where you should put a new piece of information, whatever that may be.
2. Use the two minute rule advocated by David Allen. If an action takes less than two minutes, do it there and then. No point filing it and coming back to it later because the overhead is longer than actually doing the task. This saves a lot of time.
3. If you don't have to do it then don't. Sounds really simple and obvious but just about everyone falls into the trap of checking things out and only realising at the end that nothing would have changed if they haven't spend time on it. One less task to do means you save time and you can get another real task done potentially saving you twice as much.
4. Sync all your emails, tasks, contacts and your entire settings and files across all your devices (home computer, mobile, work computer, laptop and so on) so when you change something you let the machines to take care of the rest.
5. Set up automatic actions based on emails. For example, if you ordered something from Amazon and got a confirmation email, use that to create an action automatically scheduled for seven days later to remind you to check if the parcel has been delivered. The more you offload from your mind to machines the more you can think of other things.
6. Set up automatic reminder for yourself. In other words get the machines to check on you. For example I have a periodic reminder that comes up on a regular basis to remind me of this: 'are you inventing things to do to avoid the important task?' I look at it and I ask myself the same question and I go from there, sometimes feeling guilty.

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Technology-based time saving tips wanted

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