What would you do with an extra 6.5 weeks every year?

Well, saving just one hour a day in a 5-day work week would give you that, and you can use the web to do it! (5 hours x 52 weeks / 40 hours) An hour a day may not sound like that much, but 6.5 extra weeks is huge. Can you imagine the things you could do with that?

Whether you want to spend more time with your family, travel, laze around, or work on the business instead of in it, you have to admit that having all those extra weeks would be amazing.

Here’s how I used the web to help one of my clients do that.

The company published an information product with technical specs for thousands of boats. It was mostly used by marine surveyors and yacht brokers, but individuals also bought it to help them in the boat buying process.

A big time suck for the publisher was that so many people reached out asking which volume of the book was most likely to include the type of boat they might like to buy. The question was practically impossible to answer, but that’s not an acceptable reply to customers when you want to build relationships.

We developed a tool that let visitors search for their interests, like how many people they wanted to be able to sleep, whether they wanted a full head and galley, whether they planned on bluewater sailing, etc. The tool searched the thousands of boats in all volumes of the book and returned those that met their interests, telling them exactly which volume each boat was in.

Customers were thrilled because whether they bought one volume or all of them, they knew the volume(s) they bought would include boats that suited them.

The client was thrilled because it eliminated so many phone calls and emails asking the same unanswerable question, ultimately saving an average of an hour each day just by not having to reply to those emails and phone calls.

What’s one of your biggest time sucks? Chances are there’s a way you can use technology to get that time back!