Getting Rid of Paperwork in Your Business: Where the Hours Really Go

You get rid of paperwork by first writing down where it ties up your hours. It's rarely in one place: hunting for receipts, retyping details, invoice queries, filing delivery notes. A two-week tally shows you which tasks can go first, often without new software and before you hire anyone.

Why are you still in the office after hours when your day was full?

You're still in the office after hours because paperwork has no place of its own during the day. It consists of many short tasks that find no room between customers, the job site and the phone. So they move into the hour when nobody wants anything from you anymore.

This has nothing to do with how hard you work. Your day was full, and the work in it was real. The gap is somewhere else: between the time you spend in the office and what is visibly done at the end.

The reason for this gap is the way the work is spread out. A task of four minutes doesn't register with you. Twenty of them a day would, but you never see them side by side.

You know the sequence from your own day. You start a quote in the morning, then the phone rings. After the call there's a delivery note on your desk, which you put aside for a moment. At noon a customer asks about their invoice, and you look for it between two appointments. In the evening the quote from the morning is still open.

Each of these interruptions costs you twice. Once in the minutes for the task itself. And a second time in the time it takes you to remember where you were in the quote.

The evening hour also has a drawback that is easy for you to overlook. You have quiet then, but nobody you can ask. Your accountant's office is closed, the customer can't be reached, and neither can the supplier. Whatever needs a question answered stays open and is back on your desk tomorrow.

As long as you don't see the tasks side by side, you look for the solution in the wrong place. You think about an office assistant or new technology before you know what exactly is costing you the hours.

That's why your way out of paperwork starts with a question that comes before any purchase: where exactly do the hours go?

Where do the hours really go with paperwork?

The hours go to four places: hunting for receipts, retyping details, queries about invoices, and filing. None of these looks big on its own. Together they decide when you switch off the light in the evening.

Hunting for receipts. A receipt reaches you in several ways: by post, by email, as a photo on your phone, as a slip of paper in the car. Each way is a separate place where you'll search later. Putting it away costs you little; finding it again costs you a lot.

You recognize this spot by a sentence you say to yourself: "I know I have that somewhere." The sentence is true. The receipt is there, you just don't know in which of your places. So you aren't looking for one receipt, you're going through your inboxes one after another.

Retyping details. You write name, address and service into the quote. Then you write the same details into the invoice, into the spreadsheet and into the email to the customer. Each repetition costs you minutes and brings the chance of a typo with it.

The typo is the more expensive part. A wrong house number or two swapped digits in the amount only comes to your attention when the customer gets in touch. Then you correct the invoice, send it again and wait longer for your money. Two minutes of retyping have turned into a query for you.

Queries about invoices. A customer asks whether the invoice has gone out yet. Your accountant asks about a missing receipt. You chase unpaid invoices. Each of these questions interrupts you and sends you back to the first spot: searching.

Queries are more than a disruption for you. They show you where a piece of information was missing or couldn't be found. If three customers ask you the same thing in one week, the same piece of information was missing from your paperwork three times.

Filing delivery notes. Filing gets put off because it is never urgent. The pile grows, and with it the search time at the next query. This is how one spot feeds the other.

This is where the loop closes for you. The pile lengthens the search. The search delays the answer to the query. The query interrupts the work in which you are retyping details. So you aren't dealing with four separate items, but with a loop that drives itself.

The format changes little about that. Whether an invoice reaches you on paper, as a PDF or as an e-invoice: as long as it comes in through several channels and nobody has decided where it belongs, you keep searching.

A desk full of notes and slips doesn't mean you're disorganized. It means the same detail sits in several places, and none of them is the binding one.

Which of the four spots ties up the most hours for you is something I can't tell you from the outside. You can find out for yourself in two weeks.

How do you find out in two weeks which office work costs the most time?

You find out by noting every office task for two weeks with a tally mark and an estimated duration. Then you calculate for each task: minutes times frequency. The order that results often differs from your gut feeling.

A sheet of paper next to the keyboard is enough. Three columns: what did I do, how long did it take, what triggered it. One line per task, and just a tally mark when it repeats.

A task here is anything you do with documents in the office that has a beginning and an end. "Wrote invoice" is one task. "Looked up the address in the quote" is a separate one. The smaller you make the lines, the more precisely you'll see later what you can cut.

You estimate the duration, you don't time it. An estimate accurate to two minutes is enough for you, because what you want at the end is a ranking and not bookkeeping of your time. What matters is that you note it immediately and not from memory in the evening.

The third column is the most important one. "Looked for receipt" tells you what took time. "Looked for receipt because the accountant asked" tells you where you can start.

The trigger separates the symptom from the cause for you. The search is the symptom. The cause is that the receipt didn't reach the accountant the first time. If you only speed up the search, the question comes back next month.

Two weeks is no accident. A single week also shows you outliers, such as the one day when everything came at once. Only in the second week do you see what recurs, and only what recurs is worth changing.

Then you do the maths. A worked example with assumed figures, put in your own: six minutes of searching per receipt, five receipts a day. That's 30 minutes a day and 2.5 hours in a week of five working days. The single task was never the problem; the frequency was.

A second example, again with assumed figures: three minutes to type in customer details one more time, eight times a day. That's 24 minutes a day and two hours a week. By feel you would probably have ranked this item far down, because no single round holds you up.

At the end of the two weeks you sort your lines by minutes per week, the largest first. The first three lines are your brief. Everything below them you leave alone for now.

You may be thinking: another list, even more paperwork. The difference is that this list ends after two weeks and gives you a decision. How you track down such inconspicuous time-eaters across your whole business is something I show in Which Process in Your Business Costs the Most Time Without You Noticing?

What you haven't counted, you can't cut.

Which tasks can go first?

The tasks that can go first are the ones that occur often and don't need your judgement. As a rule, these are retyping and searching. Neither arises from the job itself, but from the way the details reach you and where they sit.

The distinction behind this is simple. Pricing a quote needs your judgement, because that is where your experience lies. Copying the customer's address into the invoice does not. Both appear in your calendar as "office", but only one of them is your work.

Go through your list in this order, from top to bottom, starting with the task with the most minutes:

1. Drop it. Does anyone need the result of this task? A list nobody reads and a copy nobody looks for can be cut without replacement.
2. Once instead of twice. Where do you type the same detail several times? Decide where it is entered first and take it from there.
3. Batch it. What you do twenty times a day one at a time, you handle in one fixed block without the start-up time in between.
4. Fixed rule. What always runs the same way needs your decision only once: when you set the rule.

An everyday example for each step. Drop it: the printout of an invoice you have already filed as a file anyway. Once instead of twice: the customer details you carry over from the quote and don't write again. Batch it: delivery notes you file once a day at a fixed time. Fixed rule: every incoming invoice goes to the same place on the day it arrives.

The order matters. If you start at point 4, you set rules for tasks that would have disappeared at point 1. So you cut first and organize afterwards.

The obvious objection is that you dealt with dropping things long ago. Check it against your list and not from memory. You no longer question familiar tasks, precisely because they are so short. The list shows them to you for the first time with a number next to them.

What can be changed without new software

There are four things you can change this week, with what you already have.

One inbox for receipts. Decide on a single place where every receipt lands first: a mailbox, a folder, a tray. Everything that arrives somewhere else is taken there the same day. From then on you search in one place and not in five.

This also applies to the channels you can't get rid of. The slip from the car is photographed and put in the same folder. The invoice from the second mailbox is forwarded. The channels may stay different for you, as long as the destination is the same.

One naming pattern. Give every file the same structure, for example date, sender, subject. Then you find a receipt through search and don't need your memory for it.

If you start the date with the year, your folder sorts itself by time. Which structure you choose is secondary. What counts is that you and everyone in your business use the same one.

One source for customer details. Decide where name, address and order are recorded first. Quote, invoice and email draw on it. What you have entered correctly once, you copy and don't retype.

That can be the spreadsheet you already keep. The rule that goes with it: changes are made only there. If a customer moves, you enter the new address in that one place, and every later invoice takes it from there.

A fixed answer to recurring queries. If your phone never stops ringing, count which three questions come most often. Answer them before they are asked: with a sentence in the order confirmation or a note on the invoice.

If you are regularly asked when the invoice will arrive, for instance, write the date into the order confirmation. The information costs you one sentence, worded once. The question would have cost you an interruption every time.

None of these four changes costs you money. They cost you a decision and two weeks of sticking to it.

You may be thinking: too simple to make the difference. Each of the four changes targets one of the four places where your hours go. One inbox shortens the search. One source ends the retyping. The fixed answer reduces the queries. The naming pattern turns filing into a task of seconds.

One place beats five places.

What can you hand off before you hire an office assistant?

You can hand off everything you can describe in a few sentences so that someone else does it without asking you. Sorting receipts, writing invoices to a fixed pattern, matching incoming payments. What you can't describe stays with you even with an office assistant, because they will ask you.

Run the test on one line of your list. Write down in three sentences how the task runs: what triggers it, what needs to be done, where the result ends up. If you manage that, you can hand it off. If you need an "it depends", there is still a decision in it that only you have made so far.

That's why the list comes before the job ad. After two weeks and the four changes, you see what is left. That is the work you are really deciding about.

This remainder splits into three groups:

• Your judgement: work where you have to decide. That stays with you.
• A person: work that calls for a sense of proportion and contact. An office assistant can be the right answer for this.
• A fixed rule: work that always runs the same way. It can happen by itself, without anyone having to think of it.

Two questions make the sorting easy for you. Does someone have to weigh things up here? Then the line belongs to you or to a person. Does it run the same way every time, following the pattern "if this, then that"? Then it belongs in the third group.

An example of the third group: an enquiry arrives by email, the appointment is entered, the confirmation goes out, and both sides are reminded. At no point in this sequence does anyone weigh anything up. It still costs you minutes every time, as long as you do it by hand.

If you hire before you have sorted, you hand a new person the old paper chaos. Then you pay a salary for someone else to do the searching. If you sort first, you know what you need help for and what kind.

The sorting helps you even if you do hire in the end. Your three sentences per task are the onboarding. The new assistant starts with described tasks and a single inbox, and you answer fewer questions in the first week.

For the third group there is a dedicated path, and that is what we take care of at imprUvement.

Start with the Challenge at imprUvement