Ancestry CEO says these 10 strategies will save you time at work and help you become more productive

• Perspectives is a weekly newsletter about careers, leadership, and growth by Ancestry CEO Deb Liu.
• Liu says to automate what you can, communicate clearly, and don't be afraid to say no.
• The biggest hurdle is permitting yourself to actually put her tips into practice.

The following article was originally published December 2, 2022 on Perspectives.

This week, I shared 10 simple ways you can save 10 hours a month, but why stop there? If you can find ways to save time at work, you'll be able to invest those hours in other, more productive activities. 

With that in mind, here are 10 more ways to save 10 more hours every month — this time in the workplace.

While these are relatively simple suggestions, the biggest thing is not the habits themselves, but giving yourself permission to actually put them into practice on a day-to-day basis.

1. Be intentional about the meetings you join 

Too many times, we join meetings just because we are invited, and not because we really need to be there. If you don't have an action item, or are not key in the DACI, it's time to ask yourself, "Why am I here?" 

Many organizers over-invite as a courtesy so people won't feel left out and complain. In reality, the list of people who actually need to be there is often much shorter. A simple way to save time is to review your calendar and look for at least one to two meetings each month that you can skip without losing anything. 

Meetings are not like weddings, where it is an honor to be invited. They are places to get productive work done. If you are not contributing, give yourself permission to skip.

2. Set up screening mechanisms 

When I worked on a payments team many years ago, every team in the company would ask us to scope everything they wanted to build. Our PMs and engineers invested hours in meetings listening to the latest pitches or ideas. Many of them were still half-baked or in the exploration phase. For a platform team, this was par for the course, but it was also a big time sink. 

Then we made one change: our TPM created a form asking a simple set of questions before an engineer would meet with the requesting team. In just a few weeks, the volume of asks went down by nearly two thirds.

The problem was that we had been making it too easy to ask us to review something, without making the other team think through it first. Once we started asking questions like whether they had the resources, and requesting that they prioritize their product within their own teams before coming to us, they suddenly realized that it was not worth wasting our time. It wasn't that anybody was acting maliciously; it was just easier to set up time with us as the next step rather than doing the work themselves. 

This screening mechanism reduced the overhead for us and made it a lot easier to not have to say no all the time. If you find yourself getting pulled in lots of directions like this, try setting up a filtering system of your own.

3. Reduce the TPS reports in your life 

In the movie Office Space, the protagonist is repeatedly asked why his TPS report doesn't have the proper cover sheet. His boss is constantly on him about this, something that is ultimately trivial and meaningless. No one even seems to read these reports, and this type of "busy work" is mocked as part of office life. 

An easy way to free up time is to find the TPS reports in your own life. What are you being asked to do that's not worth doing? How can you automate them away?

I once worked at a place where many PMs wrote individual HPM (Highlights, People, Me) reports for their product areas, but the volume was so great that no one read them. Eventually, we started collaborating on a single org-level HPM, which would be sent out for our whole team to several hundred recipients and posted in our team group once every two weeks. That way, each individual team only had to contribute one or two bullets, which was huge, especially on weeks when there was nothing new.

We also centralized the pulling of the metrics so that it was done by one person, rather than multiple teams. The net result was that more people read the updates, and everyone did much less work. 

4. Automate

During various periods of high growth, I was often asked by executives for updates on how things were going with our product. It was tedious to have to go to the dashboard, manually pull the data, and constantly email it out.

Then one brilliant engineer decided to write a script that would automatically send out the data every few hours, which we all filtered into a folder. If anyone asked, we would forward the latest email and point them to how they could subscribe. This saved everyone time and energy gathering data for updates, and it diverted a large number of random queries about product metrics.  

If you often find yourself doing something that can be automated, automate it so you can scale yourself. The extra time investment upfront will save you countless hours down the line. 

5. Document hard decisions 

I once worked on a product that required us to make extremely hard calls upfront before we decided how we wanted to launch it. However, each new person assigned to work with us would question every small decision. Most were simply curious, but others wanted to change the decisions we had made.

It took a lot of time to explain why we had taken the path we had, since it had taken months of discussion with multiple cross-functional teams—and even the executive team—to get clearance. 

Finally, one of our PMs created a "hard decisions" document. There, he documented a dozen of the toughest questions that kept coming up and gave detailed explanations for why we had made the choices we'd made. Every new person who worked with us was asked to read it upon onboarding, and when the question inevitably cropped up again, they were sent the document.

This saved so much time, and as a living document, it became a key source of truth after the product was moved to another team.   

Constantly having to answer the same questions can eat up more time than you might think. By creating an FAQ for the tough calls, you can save yourself the work of always having to defend your decisions.

6. Give a fast "no" or "not now"  

Saying "no" in a work context is absolutely okay. I often encounter people who feel the need to please their coworkers, because they know they may need their help in the future. But by ensuring you are working only on things that are in the company's best interest, you are saving yourself and the company time. This also ensures you are not spinning your wheels doing things that will ultimately not have an impact.  

That said, your response doesn't always need to be a flat-out "no". The right answer may be to say, "We are not doing this in this half, but let's sync in June when we are planning for H2." It is absolutely okay to revisit something at a future date rather than "keeping things warm" which many teams want to do. 

7. Templatize what you can 

There is no need to reinvent the wheel. Any time you set up a template or a process for something that is repeatable, it can reduce the overhead.

For example, legal contracts, statements of work, and dashboards can (and should!) be templatized whenever possible. Set a goal of having 90% of the incoming work you do go through a standard process. 

It is always tempting for other teams to ask you to do custom work, but if you respond, "This is what you can get now. The wait for custom work is X weeks," suddenly the standardized option becomes a lot more palatable. 

8. Help others understand the costs 

We all try to be nice to one another, and we want to be helpful. But often others will ask something of us without understanding just how hard it is to do. We absorb the cost, and they may get what they need, but they don't know whether what they're asking for will take five minutes, five hours, or five days of work. 

One time, during a meeting, I asked what I thought was a fairly innocuous question about a registrant (someone who signed up for an account) and how they were valued. It was a simple question that I thought would have a five-minute answer — something someone could get me offline.

Two weeks later, they set up a half-hour meeting and showed me a document with a very detailed analysis of registrant value in different scenarios. I was horrified that they had taken a simple question and spent so much time on it, but it was my fault for not specifying. 

Many people ask questions without knowing whether their asks are large or small. To get to clarity faster, ask the person asking you, "Would you like the five-minute answer or the five-hour answer?" Then act accordingly. 

9. Escalate and get to an answer faster

We often fear escalation, because it makes us feel like we can't manage to get to the answer ourselves, but many times, escalation is actually the fastest and simplest way to get clarity in a timely manner. An escalation, when done well, is not failure, but rather a success.

Start by asking yourself, "Would another meeting get us to an answer, or should we just ask for clarity now?" Organizations often have different goals, and clarifying things faster can often mean saving dozens of hours. 

One escalation I was a part of ended up involving two teams at war over something that, in my mind, was rather trivial. I was on recharge, so when I returned, my team asked for my help to resolve the issue. I called the other Product Group leader, and within 10 minutes, we had worked it out. What they valued and what I valued differed greatly, and our teams were fighting over what they thought we wanted, but I traded something I didn't care about (the right to have their team lead the launch announcement) in exchange for the thing we did care about (what it was named). We got a consensus immediately.  

We often waste a lot of time spinning our wheels and speculating when a simple escalation would give us a clear, quick answer. This saves time and energy and allows us to focus on more important priorities.

10. Run meetings well to avoid even more meetings 

If you want to save time down the line, simple meeting hygiene will go a long way. That means setting your meetings up with an agenda, a list of things you hope to achieve, a clear invite list, and pre-reads (sent out 24-48 hours ahead of time). Open meetings with a clear understanding of what you hope the outcome will be, and remember to send out meeting notes, action items, and owners. 

When you send out pre-reads and post-meeting notes, you are giving everyone a chance to opt out if they have no input or insight to add. By laying out clear action items, you are ensuring there are fewer "zombie meetings" where issues keep rising from the dead to haunt you. Focus on getting to a clear, documented answer and moving on. Lastly, make sure everyone "says it in the room," and that everything is aired in the meeting, rather than brought up later. 

Running your meetings well the first time around is the best way to avoid redundant meetings in the future. (If you haven't already, I encourage you to check out my post on how to conduct great product reviews. Those tips will help you ensure that each meeting you run is productive and doesn't require follow-up.) 

The upfront investment is worth the long-term gains

There you have it: 10 simple ways to save up to 10 hours a month at work. None of these tips is particularly special, but it is surprising how often we fall into negative patterns. In doing so, we're wasting time that we could be investing in more productive things. 

If you only take away one thing from this post, it's this: being kind to yourself, and helping others help you, is the key to more productivity in less time. Be intentional about where you choose to spend your time. Automate what you can, communicate clearly, and don't be afraid to say no when you need to.

This may seem challenging at first, but the upfront investment is worth the long-term gains. By using these strategies to reduce busywork and repetitive tasks, you will find yourself with more time and energy to spend on the things that really matter.