When we started Workflow Autopilot, we would always say to clients and prospects, we’d say, we’ll save you more time.

The problem with that is that saving time isn’t really sexy. In a lot of people’s jobs and careers, doing the job faster doesn’t always necessarily mean that their work gets done.

It depends on the industry

For some industries, and this is really dependent on the industry, if the work gets done, great, but there’s always something to do.

So for like an analyst role where you’re sitting there looking at different angles, the work will never be done because there’s always a new way to approach a solution.

Now for an industry like accounting, and I won’t pretend I know a lot about accounting, but I will say that they have a very rigid system. So they’ll have their checks, they have their discovery, they have to do tests. That’s just for the audit side. For tax, you have to look at the revenue, you have to look at all the information, and then you got to double check it.

And so this really depends on the industry, but overall what we found was that saying time saved doesn’t really get that much of an emotional appeal out of people. So I like to explain it in a different way.

Switching between tools breaks focus

I know everyone, myself included, will think that I’ll just take five minutes to do one simple task, and an hour later I’m off in some different task altogether.

The same thing happens to your team.

Since they’re switching so much, their high level of productivity, and when they can produce two, three times the output they would normally be able to, is being compromised by these tools that are causing them to get distracted, causing them to get off track.

Talk about the load, not the time

When I talk to companies, time saved is not usually the first thing I talk about. It’s more so what is the emotional and cognitive load of doing these small little tasks that your tools and your software should be doing automatically.

The people with the talent and the high domain knowledge where their skills are actually mattering and making a difference, we want to make sure that we can get the most out of their expertise, out of their knowledge.

Keeping them in a high productivity zone will be very important to the profitability and the output of your company.