What do you spend your workday on? Surely on many tasks, but undoubtedly, a lot of them are related to administrative or bureaucratic work; those tasks that, while absolutely necessary, add little value to the business or are tedious and routine. Today, almost everyone becomes an assistant, auditor, and accountant, whether for themselves or for colleagues.

Sending emails and filling in Excel sheets have become unavoidable work processes. No matter what your role or tasks are, it’s hard to imagine a position in which you don’t spend a significant part of your day on these administrative issues. If we add to that the operations we must carry out with different applications and programs… what’s left of your day? How much time are you really spending on achieving business objectives?

There are paradigmatic processes to realize this issue, such as treasury management. In a typical IGN client, cash flow forecasting (logging into each bank’s online platform, downloading transactions, integrating them into the Excel history, and printing each account) can take up to 2 hours and 45 minutes daily; to which we must add the manual integration into the management system, with an additional estimated two hours per week. With just a banking aggregator, the first operation can be reduced to 5 minutes per day, and the second, to 2 minutes per week. In other words, from more than 15 hours per week to barely half an hour.

According to Craig Lambert, editor of Harvard Magazine for more than 20 years, we end up doing a lot of work for nothing. Most of us don’t recognize it, maybe we don’t even truly notice it, but part of the day we’re working for nothing. And the worst part is not just the wasted time, but its direct consequences: first, that this time is not being spent on what truly matters—what makes the company more competitive and sustainable. Second, that these routine tasks drain our energy (leaving us with less for important tasks) and create a kind of servitude.

The truth is that life now is much busier. The day still has the same hours, time hasn’t disappeared; but it seems we have less of it. This is due to several factors. Some are related to free time which, for many people, has become a task in itself: you must do things, discover places, try experiences… and share them on social media. FOMO (fear of missing out) also plays a role—a “syndrome” that drives us to spend time on social networks, news outlets, courses, and entertainment platforms like Netflix. Others are related to work itself; such as the ongoing downsizing of administrative departments, which has not been accompanied by a reduction in administrative workload. Many processes remain necessary; but in many companies now all employees do them: booking their trips, managing expenses, sending emails, monitoring budgets, maintaining IT equipment, etc.

In The Invisible Loop, Remedios Zafra speaks of the endless repetition, the digital overload that leaves no empty moments—demanded activities, requests, collaborations, and, in general, an overload of requirements, formalities, justifications, reports, payment orders, self-assessments… a bureaucratic overload of tasks that, in reality, we can turn into automated processes.

The problem multiplies with the illusion of multitasking. We believe we have the ability to do several things at once; but reality has proven otherwise. In a work meeting, we think we’re following the discussion while checking email; but if we really pay attention to what’s being said, it’s hard to understand what we read, and vice versa. Even if we appear or pretend to be, people are not multitaskers—at least not if we want to do several things well and efficiently at the same time.

That being said, software can be multitasking, and moreover, it can help us do much more with much less. This is one of the great advantages of Business Central, the leading management software for small and medium-sized businesses. Just through task automation we can free up a significant amount of time to dedicate to processes, tasks, and activities that drive the department, the business, and the company:

• Purchasing
  • Automating purchase orders based on inventory levels.
  • Automatic approval of orders based on predefined rules.
• Warehouse
  • Automatic inventory updates when products are received.
  • Automatic replenishment according to predefined levels.
• Sales
  • Configuration of automatic discounts and promotions for certain products or customers.
  • Automation of invoicing and shipping processes.
• Projects
  • Automatic resource allocation based on availability and skills.
  • Automatic invoice generation based on progress.
• Finance
  • Automation of bank reconciliation and import of bank statements.
  • Automatic generation of financial reports.
• Human Resources
  • Automatic payroll processing with tax and deduction calculations.
  • Automatic management of employee leave and vacation requests.
• Customer Service
  • Automatic assignment of support cases to the appropriate representatives.
  • Setup of automatic responses to frequently asked questions.
• Marketing
  • Automatic campaign tracking and performance report generation.
  • Automatic sending of marketing communications based on customer activity.
• Management
  • Custom workflows for document approval or team task development.
  • Automation of notifications and alerts for specific events.

These are just a few examples of what a single ERP like BC can do to achieve more with much less time: now imagine the potential of an entire ecosystem working seamlessly together. Because time is limited, as is human capacity. MIT neuroscientist Earl Miller has shown that we can only hold one or two thoughts at once and that we are incapable of paying attention to several things simultaneously. When we multitask, we’re really just juggling—jumping quickly from one thing to another, but not executing them as we should. Worse still, that multitasking effort wears us down mentally.

It’s understandable that, for example, the temptation to read emails while doing other things is very strong. Partly because of FOMO, partly because of the feeling of saving time, and partly because of the incredible increase in daily email volume. Reading them all (and managing them) can be a titanic effort. Novsi estimates that the average office worker receives 80 emails a day. If they spend 90 seconds opening and closing each one, without going into laborious tasks and long responses, that worker spends 2 hours a day in their inbox.

And how do we justify that time? Because here we face another dilemma of modern work. Hybrid work and digitalization, among other factors, have led to greater distrust. Returning to The Invisible Loop, to a sense that is both real (manifested in pressure from supervisors) and imagined (workers feeling the need to over-justify themselves), which once again results in more bureaucracy: pressure to justify, compliance with protocols, carrying out formalities, measurements, data entry… and pretending to be productive. All of this is working time wasted on preparation, setup, filling in, and delivering documents, emails, and control application screens.

Email communication is a clear example of time slipping away almost unnoticed, even though it’s a totally necessary process that, on the other hand, greatly helps us in our day-to-day work. The good news is that we now have great opportunities to improve performance, eliminating most of the routine and inefficient processes of tools like email. For example, thanks to applications available within the Microsoft ecosystem:

• Automating email classification, auto-replies, message archiving, or deadline tracking using Power Automate.
• Creating apps to prioritize important emails and manage them effectively through Power Apps, allowing more efficient email interactions.
• Generating reports and dashboards to analyze patterns related to senders or common topics with Power BI.
• Reducing time and effort spent drafting and searching references to create more effective emails with the help of Copilot.
• Creating workflows for task reminders or filtering subscription and auto-notification emails in Outlook.
• Drafting automatic summary emails based on Teams meeting conversations without needing to write content manually.
• Connecting different Microsoft applications with email, such as calendar and CRM, to automatically synchronize data and tasks.

A high degree of automation, security, and collaboration are the hallmarks of organizations that achieve more with less, improve their long-term competitiveness, and reach new levels of excellence.