This is the time of year when, in addition to all of the rest of the tasks in our work and regular lives, we also have holiday travel, holiday parties, holiday shopping, wrapping, writing out cards, trips to the post office, and if you are lucky enough to have a good dump of snow, also finding time to go play! Already time challenged, how do we deal?
This year, I have made a concerted effort to reduce any time wasting processes that have bugged me. Here's what I did.
1) Not that I have an inordinate amount of checks to deposit each month, but still, I ordered a self-inking stamp to sign the backs of checks. Somehow, the quick "kachunk" of the stamp is very satisfying, compared to signing my name, writing the account number and the institution name every time.
2) I gave in earlier this year and got a DYMO label printer. I probably only need it once a month, but when I did have to print out a shipping label, it was a pain in the rear process of setting up Word to print that label into the right space on the used and reused sheet of Avery labels. The DYMO is suh-weet and prints out a label in a split second and it looks VERY professional too. I loved it so much, I bought the company. Wait no, that was the Remington guy. I loved it so much, I bought one for my dad after seeing him print out an address on a sheet of paper, cutting it out with scissors and then taping it to a box. Egad! He loves his too.
3) Today I finally gave in and bought a new laser printer. Mine is over 11 years old and is a trooper, but lately I have wasted way too much time and aggravation dealing with printer jams. I realized that it was time I would rather be skiing.
My client has also made some small investments with big time saving (which translates to $) payoffs. There are a ton of excel reports that are dynamically generated from either an old VB6 app or a newer .NET app every day and emailed to a variety of clients. With only a little help from me (they have an awesome intern who happens to be in school for robotics engineering or something like that) they implemented a utility called Win2PDF that will let them automatically print the excel files to PDF (until Office 12 gets here!!) and creates an outlook email using the email address that is also pushed over to Excel. This is going to save them about an hour per day of emailing reports. We are going to use the same utility to put the last step into the PDF creation directly from Crystal that we do with some other reports. These PDFs get created and stored in specific folders. Then someone goes and finds them and emails them. We talked about using System.Web.Mail to mail them out, but they want the Exchange "paper trail" and we were going to have to look into learning how to interface with Exchange. Win2PDF is going to give us this ability very simply and the prediction here is 2 hours a day of saved time! Not bad, eh?