There are many different career paths that one could be involved in, ranging from various sorts of vocational work, to strictly white-collar pursuits, and somewhat off-the-wall entrepreneurial ventures.
Elon Musk would be a good representative of this latter category -‘The off-the-wall entrepreneurial ventures’ as they are often built with the express intent of blazing a new trail through as yet unexplored territory.
While different industries and business models will have their own idiosyncrasies, and will operate in their own unique “worlds”, so to speak, there are however certain things that all businesses hold in common — at least if they are to be successful down the line.
All business need, for example, a high level of efficiency. Invested resources need to yield the greatest possible return on investment. Waste must be minimised.
A high level of competence must be maintained by all elements of the company, and branding must be immaculate and professional. Of course, these are just a few examples.
As it so happens, we live, today, in a world of unprecedented technological advancement, where a new generation of tools are at hand to help the enterprising businessman or businesswoman dominate their respective fields.
Here are some reasons why you need to take full advantage of these tools:
They can save you time and give you the room you need to manoeuvre around the competition
In business, being slow off the mark is often enough to ensure that you end up handing contracts over to your competitors, or worse yet, that you project an image of incompetence that proves naturally repellent to the kinds of people you most want as clients.
In the ever-on, fast food-influenced world we all live in today, speed and efficiency are in high demand, and those companies who can operate lithely and quickly, without compromising on quality, are the ones who will inherit the future.
For tradesmen, for example, much time is often lost in constructing quotes for a job. With a simple estimation system for the trades, such as Rapid Quote, a huge amount of time can be saved, and quotes can often be offered to clients well in advance of much of the competition.
They can create an invaluable degree of clarity and free up more of your mental resources
David Allen is famous in the business world for creating the innovative productivity and task management system known as the “Getting Things Done” method. According to Allen, the underlying assumption of this method is that the human mind is specialised in generating ideas, but does a very poor job of storing them.
The attempt to maintain a mental record of all ideas, potential tasks, and projects that could relate to the business, is, therefore, a source of much waste in the business, not to mention stress for those involved in it.
Modern tools and services not only make it infinitely easier than ever before to implement David Allen’s own GTD methodology — services such as Nozbe and Microsoft To Do excel in this regard — but they also allow for the capturing of ideas and concepts as they’re generated, in real-time.
Evernote is one of the most popular digital services in the world, currently, and allows for the saving of text notes, photos, voice notes, web links, and more, either to a web, browser, or mobile app. Once something has been captured in Evernote, it syncs to the cloud and updates across all linked devices.
They can remove many of the issues inherent in project-management
There are certain problems which seem all but inherent in project management, specifically when it comes to dealing with projects which require the input of multiple members of a professional team.
You might, for example, have one big project due with a timeframe in the not-so-distant future, which requires a high degree of work to be invested on the part of a team of writers, in addition to a graphic designer, an SEO specialist, and members of the marketing department.
Traditionally, getting such a project completed without a hitch would be a long shot, and would require a high level of organisation and oversight in order to ensure that the various team members weren’t stepping on each other’s toes, or overwriting each other’s work.
Trello is one example of a group project management tool which can relegate this issue to the past, as it allows for team members to be authorised to handle only certain, distinct elements of a project, and creates a clear, interactive, visual distinction between tasks that have yet to be attended to, those in progress, and those which have been completed.
