Turn It Up Tuesday: Tips from Insightly to Take Your Business to 11
Welcome to Turn It Up Tuesday, where we bring you 3 weekly tips—a tip on running your business, a tip on using Insightly CRM, and a tip on improving your life. Enjoy this week’s tips.
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Winning the Paper Chase |
Paper is so prevalent in our daily lives that it’s easy to forget how much of it goes to waste. Before you click the print button, ask yourself if you really need to have a hard copy of that meeting agenda. Why not make it part of a slide presentation, instead? Better yet, share it over email. If you want to get a cleaner picture of just how much paper you’re consuming, GreenPrint and EcoPrint2 are two software programs that identify areas of waste in printing and recommend ways to improve consumption. You can also conserve paper and create a more eco-friendly footprint in your office environment by purchasing chlorine-free paper or paper that’s made with more sustainable substances like bamboo, hemp, or organic cotton. Another paper-saving technique is to keep your mailing lists up to date to avoid sending out unnecessary letters or other marketing materials. You can further curb paper usage by double checking the default settings on your photocopier and printer. Make sure each device is set up so that it reverts back to printing single copies after each use. The alternative is to set up your printer so that it prints double-sided copies by default. |
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Setting Up Teams in Insightly to Prepare for Future Hires |
| If employees are wearing multiple hats in your business–but you hope to expand your team and simplify the roles–you should plan ahead for that now by creating “mock” teams.
You can create teams in Insightly with as little as one team member (user). Instead of adding specific user names, include the name of the job title that you will eventually want to hire out. While you are still filling all of those positions, you can assign yourself to those teams in order to set up and monitor repeating tasks. When you’re ready to hire out that position, change the team member from yourself to your new hire. This will simplify needing to reassign each repeating task and activity set task when you hire your new employee. With admin access, setting up teams and/or individual users in Insightly can be accomplished in a few steps:
(Tip compliments of Insightly power user, Erin Mathie, of Business Made Simple.) |
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Follow the Sunrise |
| A good night’s sleep is a precious commodity when you’re running a small business. In fact, sleep studies reveal that feeling chronically sleep deprived due to lack of sleep or trouble falling asleep (insomnia) are directly tied to the artificial light (e.g. television, computer screens, tablet readers) we subject ourselves to daily. It turns out, those attractively glowing screens are confusing our internal (circadian) clocks. Mother Nature to the rescue!
Scientific research confirms that nature has created the ideal alarm clock in the form of natural sunlight. And, the best way to avoid bouts of insomnia and improve overall sleep quality is to seek out exposure to natural sunlight. Easier said than done, however, as waking up to the sun shining on our faces is wishful thinking for those with predawn work schedules. Couple that with shorter days of winter, and uninterrupted sleep may seem like a pipe dream.  Thanks to modern science, you can bring sunlight into your bedroom anytime with specialized alarm clocks called wake up lights. Designed to mimic natural sunlight, wake up lights are designed to pull us out of sleep by slowly increasing us to the exposure of light rather than jarring us out of sleep with a loud noise.
Check out Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial right now. About the author: Marta Bright is Insightly’s Content Manager. She’s been writing about the “business of technology” in the Silicon Valley for more than a decade.
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