How Analyzing Your Tasks Can Help Make Your Home Business More Efficient

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One of the hallmarks of many large businesses is that they constantly strive to increase efficiency. An increase in efficiency means an increase in productivity and a decrease in costs. You would do well to learn how to make your home business more efficient for the same reasons. Here are a few tips to help you do just that. 

Do What They Do; Analyze Your Processes

Your home based business is a series of tasks. But have you ever took the time to break those tasks down and analyze them? If not, that's one of the first steps towards streamlining your business and making it more efficient. This is the kind of thing that larger businesses do constantly.

• Write out tasks
• Look at each task
• Redesign tasks

This is a simplistic representation of an efficiency flowchart. Even though it's simple, there's a lot you can do here. For example, consider a home business that consists of creating pieces of small, personalized artwork.

You would write out each step you take from start to finish. Perhaps you have to:

• Gather the raw materials
• Set up your workspace in preparation
• Create the piece
• Box the piece up
• Ship it to the client

You can likely break these processes down even further, but for this example, you can analyze each step as is. Write out how you accomplish each step. By writing the steps out, you can analyze them even more closely. You want to see:

• Which are taking too long
• Which you can speed up
• Which are costing you money

Once you have it all down, you can start brainstorming ways to smooth out the steps to make them faster, less costly, and more efficient. For example, purchasing the raw materials in bulk can save you money. Setting up your workstation for the next job after you finish the previous one can save you time.

Creating more in one sitting can save you time and keep you from repeating the first two steps constantly. Instead of taking the time out to box up each piece, you can invest in an automatic case sealer (such as those provided by SIAT S.p.A.). That will save you time and money. A case sealer will also help prevent damaging repetitive motions that can harm your hand and your artwork.

You can apply these principles to anything you do. Improving efficiency saves you money, makes you more money, and keeps your home business going and growing. You'll have to experiment a little, but even once you streamline your tasks, you should always periodically repeat the process to see if you can fine-tune them even more.

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1 July 2015