5 Tools To Increase Funeral Home Productivity
Funeral directors often have to wear multiple hats and manage a task list that seems never-ending. For funeral directors, productivity and effective time management are not only important, but they’re also essential. Between work and home, your time and energy can disappear quickly. To help make life a little easier for you during this busy time of year, we thought it would be a good idea to share some useful tools to help you be more productive.
Members of our team at FrontRunner use each of these apps every day to make sure we stay on track with everything we have to do. In no particular order, here are 5 apps to increase your funeral home’s productivity.
Members of our team at FrontRunner use each of these apps every day to make sure we stay on track with everything we have to do. In no particular order, here are 5 apps to increase your funeral home’s productivity.
Use Trello To Organize Your Projects
When working with a group, there are few tools better than Trello to track project progress, communicate with team members and keep everything organized and running smoothly. Best of all, IT’S FREE! At FrontRunner, everyone from our marketing team to our project managers uses this helpful platform to ensure that everybody stays on track. Not only is it easy to use, it makes it easy to communicate between team members no matter where they are. You can even create multiple boards for different tasks. This means you can have your personal tasks mapped out in one place, and your professional duties accounted for in another. Whether it’s adding notes to a card or moving on to the next stage in the project, Trello makes it incredibly easy to stay organized.
FocusList Structures Your Day
For more than 20 years, the Pomodoro Technique has helped people manage tasks and stay on track. If you’re unfamiliar with the technique, it involves using a timer to break work up into intervals that are separated by short breaks. Each interval lasts for 25 minutes of distraction-free work. After 25 minutes, you mark a checkmark next to your task and take a 5-minute break. The process continues with 25-minute work intervals and 5-minute breaks. Once you’ve gone through 4 intervals, take a longer break of 15-30 minutes. FocusList takes this technique and turns it into an easy to use app. Not only does it track the time you spend on a task, but it also allows you to have better concentration and focus. If you have a bunch of work to finish before some much need time off during the holidays, FocusList can help you stay on track.
Meditate and Prepare Your Mind with Mindfulness
Studies have shown that meditating for just 5 minutes a day can help you cope with your daily tasks. Now I know what you’re thinking – isn’t spending time doing nothing counterintuitive to increasing productivity? Simply put, no it’s not! Meditating can help you become more productive because it helps prevents multiple tasks and thoughts from becoming overwhelming. Spending just 5 minutes a day can help you recharge and refocus your mind for what’s next on your task list. A great app to help with this is Mindfulness. It’s a guided meditation app that helps you manage your meditation sessions.
Ensure Mistake-Free Writing with Grammarly
From writing emails to helping families with obituaries, a funeral director spends a lot of time behind a keyboard. Thanks to Grammarly, now you can ensure that everything you write is easy to read and free of spelling or grammatical errors. While you should always use a human to proofread your work, Grammarly can help make the editing process easier and more efficient. It even has Google Chrome and Microsoft Word extensions that instantly check for errors as you write.
Plan Ahead with Google Calendar
With services, arrangement conferences and staff meetings to juggle, it’s important for funeral directors to stay organized and remember where and when they’re supposed to be somewhere. Google Calendar is one such app that is both easy to use and allows you to plan ahead. Not only can you schedule events in your calendar, but you can also even send invites to other people that will be in attendance. FrontRunner has taken things one step further and now offers an integration between Google Calendars and our Pulse Business System. For funeral directors, this means you can export one or all your upcoming visitations and services directly from your Pulse Business System into your Google Calendar. This makes scheduling your time both easy and efficient.
Staying Productive Has Never Been Simpler
These are just some of the tools our team uses to stay ahead and make managing our time that much easier. If you’re looking to improve your productivity, make sure to reach out and schedule a time to speak with us. Much like many of these tools, our software solutions and marketing services are designed to make your life easier and more productive.
I encourage you to schedule a strategy session with us to talk about how we can improve your funeral home’s productivity and stand out from the competition. Every day we help thousands of firms succeed online and grow their business – yours could be next!
Tommy holds a Communications degree from Laurentian University and an Integrated Marketing Communications Graduate Certificate from St. Lawrence College. He is a Content Marketing Specialist at FrontRunner and focuses on producing engaging content that funeral homes can use to connect with families. In addition, Tommy crafts SEO content for clients and specializes in helping the general public connect with the death care industry as a whole.