The Five Main Things Your Business Can Do to Save Time

Preface

In this post, we’ll cover five strategies for working smarter and freeing your team from unnecessary toil. You’ll learn how to automate repetitive tasks, streamline communication, use cloud-based solutions, delegate effectively, and prioritise for maximum efficiency. By the end, you’ll be able to apply real, practical tactics to optimise your operations and drive your business forward.

Introduction

Let’s illustrate these strategies with a fictitious online marketplace called LambdaThreads. This platform specialises in custom-printed merchandise for tech events, shipping orders worldwide. One of the biggest challenges at LambdaThreads is juggling customer inquiries, order management, and vendor updates—tasks that consume precious developer time if handled manually.

To tackle these issues, LambdaThreads measures latency across various AWS services (primarily API Gateway and AWS Lambda) and tracks how often developers get pulled into non-critical tasks. Minimising this “context-switch” is essential for faster development cycles and seamless user experiences. By applying the five time-saving methods below, LambdaThreads ensures developers stay focused on writing clean, reliable code rather than wrestling with routine admin tasks.

Why

Time is one of the most valuable resources for a growing business. When developers and product owners are bogged down by repetitive manual work, overall productivity declines. Slower response times to customer queries, delayed feature rollouts, or missed opportunities to innovate—these setbacks add up quickly.

By actively streamlining your operations, you:

1. Free Up Developer Time: Let engineers focus on building features and refining architecture.
2. Reduce Human Error: Automated workflows and clear communication channels curb mistakes.
3. Enhance Customer Experience: Faster responses and smoother processes keep customers happy.
4. Scale with Confidence: Efficient foundations pave the way for future growth.

Build Example

1. Automate Repetitive Tasks

• Identify Tasks: Start by listing all routine duties. For LambdaThreads, it might be sending invoices, updating shipment statuses, or creating order confirmations.
• Pick Tools:
  • AWS Lambda to trigger automatic status updates when an order is shipped.
  • Zapier to sync new customer sign-ups from an email tool to a CRM system.
  • QuickBooks for automated invoicing (and integration with your e-commerce platform).
• Implement:
  1. Create an S3 Event Trigger: When a new order file is placed in S3, AWS Lambda automatically processes it and updates an order database in DynamoDB.
  2. Set Up a Zapier “Zap”: Each new invoice created in QuickBooks automatically updates the record in a customer management system.

2. Streamline Communication

• Centralise Team Chats: Use something like Slack or Microsoft Teams for day-to-day discussions. Encourage short, focused messages rather than lengthy threads.
• Establish Channels: Have dedicated channels for development, customer support, and operations. This ensures all relevant updates are shared with the right group.
• Cut Down Meetings: Shift status updates to quick Slack check-ins or recorded Loom videos, so your team can watch them asynchronously.

3. Use Cloud-Based Tools

• Enable Remote Access: Host critical data on platforms like Google Drive or Amazon S3, allowing team members to access files from anywhere.
• Collaborative Editing: Tools such as Google Docs or Office 365 let multiple people work on the same file simultaneously. This speeds up documentation and code review cycles.
• Faster Deployments: For developers, AWS services like CodeCommit, CodeBuild, and CodePipeline automate CI/CD, reducing manual deployment steps.

4. Delegate Effectively

• Identify Strengths: At LambdaThreads, the front-end developer might handle design tweaks, while the back-end specialist covers infrastructure tasks.
• Train and Empower: Delegation isn’t just dumping tasks; it’s giving the right people the resources and authority to do the job well.
• Use Project Management Tools: Platforms like Asana or Monday.com can assign tasks to the right team members, set deadlines, and track progress effortlessly.

5. Prioritise and Plan

• Rank Tasks: Clarify what needs immediate attention (e.g., critical bug fixes) and what can wait (e.g., minor UI adjustments).
• Visualise Work: Kanban boards (e.g., Trello or Jira) help you see your to-do list at a glance, making it clear what’s next.
• Block Out Key Time: Reserve your best hours for deep work—whether it’s coding a new feature or planning architecture changes.

Gotchas (Optional)

• Automation Overkill: Over-automating can create brittle workflows. Maintain a balance; ensure you keep humans in the loop where necessary.
• Collaboration Pitfalls: Too many channels or poorly labelled ones can cause confusion. Keep your communication environment tidy.

Conclusion

By integrating these five strategies—automation, streamlined communication, cloud adoption, effective delegation, and careful prioritisation—your business can drastically reduce wasted time. LambdaThreads, our fictitious example, managed to keep developers laser-focused on shipping new features while background tasks handled themselves in AWS.

In practical terms:

1. Start small: Automate the one repetitive task that drains the most time each week.
2. Communicate clearly: Reduce clutter and confusion with dedicated channels and short updates.
3. Adopt cloud tools: Make it easy to collaborate and work from anywhere.
4. Delegate wisely: Allocate tasks to the right people, and empower them with the authority to excel.
5. Plan proactively: Ensure you prioritise vital tasks and avoid last-minute scrambles.

Implement these actions to give your team more breathing room for innovation, problem-solving, and strategic growth. Over time, you’ll see how small tweaks to operations can transform your business’s productivity and momentum.