A small change in the way we work could shave 45 minutes off of the average workday. That small change is to use a news aggregator to get news instead of gathering it by hand. Applied across a 200 person company, that 45 minutes of savings could be worth $1,650,000 a year. The wild part is that the cost to implement this is only $8,000 and requires little if any support from the IT department.
If we are going to really boost productivity, we are going to need to focus on those improvements that provide the most bang for the buck. Small changes in work habits can have amazing results. To get at these nuggets, companies need to spend time really watching what people do with their time. If they did, they would find that much of the time they spend is wasted on simple tasks that could easily be automated.
Other things to focus on:
1) Auto-categorization of e-mail.
2) Integrated search (desktop, LAN, K-Logs, Web) with all proprietary doc formats revealed as HTML.
3) Voice mail on the desktop PC.
4) Accurate K-Logging of current activities: status, thinking, plans, projects, etc.
5) Online presentations, to-do lists, project plans via outlines.
6) K-Log personal portals that integrate all connection info (e-mail, IM, phone, address, bio, resume, picture).
Very simple stuff can yield big results. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]