If you work from home then you know that your time is valuable. Creating ways to automate your home business can save valuable time or even provide you with more time to build your business. By pinpointing the things that take up the largest part of your time, you will be able to begin to find more efficient ways to complete your work.

Managing your email or communication is a great place to start. Whether it be simple emails or answering questions over the phone, you can become more efficient. Being in a situation where you have to tell people the same thing many times can become overwhelming; don't worry, you can easily lessen you workload.

If you are answering questions over the phone then make sticky notes of common questions and answers. If you're on the go then get one of those tiny spiral notepads. Instead of writing out detailed answers, just make a checklist of the things that you must say to your customer to answer the specific question. Once you spend some time doing this you will end up with most of your answers memorized; this makes it easy to find even better ways to handle your customer's questions or problems.

Perhaps email is where your redundancy is; email is even easier to deal with than phone communication. If you send email with the same type of information to each of your customers then you've got a lot of typing to do; let's make this easier!

Send an email to yourself - just like the one that you normally have to send out to your customer - make it perfect. We will call this email your 'template email'. Now, every time you have to send this type of email out, you already have a starting point.

Go to your inbox and find that 'template email' that you sent to your self. Scroll down to the very bottom; click and hold your mouse button and drag it up to the very top of your email. Let go of your mouse button when all of the text has been highlighted.

Now, click the edit menu at the top of your email program and choose 'Copy'.

Next, make a new email to your customer; it's getting so easy. Click where you would normally type your message and then go to the edit menu again; click paste.

WOW! That's all there is to it. Of coarse you need to change the contact info to your customer's info. Make any necessary changes to the text, give it a subject and click send! You can refine your 'template email' until you only have to change the customers name and contact info; creating efficient template emails will save your more and more time.

These same ideas can be applied to many other areas of communication. The next time you are communicating with a client and you realize that you are repeating your self, remember to automate! Small notes and templates will save you weeks in the long run; they work for me and they can work for you.

There, we eased some of your workload for today - and - forever!

Copyright Chris Brown