Category
Working better
Spreadsheets, file management, automation and dividing up the work: small, practical ways to make daily work easier.
Articles
16 articles
Working betterNovember is "no pushing the burden onto suppliers" month: how to ask for, and take on, rush jobsJapan's labour ministry, working with the Small and Medium Enterprise Agency and the Fair Trade Commission, has made November a campaign month against pushing overwork onto suppliers. Why rush orders and late changes are a problem, what buyers and suppliers can each change this month, and where to get advice.Working betterToo Many Work Notifications? Cut Them Without Missing What MattersEmail, chat and calendar alerts arriving all day break your focus and still let important messages slip by. Decide where urgent messages go, sort routine notifications and duplicates, try it for a week and review, and know which alerts must not be switched off.Working better"Which One Is the Latest?" Managing Shared Work FilesFiles named "final," "final 2" and "final_fixed" pile up until nobody knows which is right. Decide three things to stop the confusion: one official location, a status (in progress, awaiting review, final), and who signs off. Explained with a quote workflow.Working betterMore Handy Tools, Same Amount of Work. Why?A new tool sped up one task, yet the job as a whole feels no lighter. When that happens, look at data entry, copying, checking and waiting across the whole workflow. How to map the flow, what to consider before automating, and what to compare.Working betterBreaking "Only She Can Do It" Into Tasks You Can Hand OverOn short-staffed floors, work drifts to the veteran and stops when they are out. Split their day into judgement and routine, then cut the routine into pieces a new hire or part-timer can take.Working betterWork Your Full-Time Staff Need Not Do: Three Ways to Sort ItWhen full-time overtime keeps rising, look at the work before the headcount. Sort it into core, support and routine, and decide what can go to others, to tools, or outside.Working betterJapan's Subcontract Act became the "Toritekiho" in January 2026Since 1 January 2026 Japan's Subcontract Act has been the Toritekiho. Headcount now counts alongside capital in deciding who is covered, promissory-note payment is banned, and setting a price without discussing it is prohibited. What to check if you have not yet.Working betterToo Many Tools: How to Decide What to CutTools you added to save time can turn into a burden. How to decide what to keep, what to merge, and what to leave separate.Working betterWhere to Start With DX in a Small BusinessDX does not have to start with buying software. Map how work really flows, find the duplicate entry, and fix the smallest task first.Working betterFive First Steps Away From "Only She Knows How"When one person's absence stops a task, start with five things: one page of procedure, a file location, no shared accounts, access, a test run.Working betterDoes a Three, Five or Ten Person Company Need Groupware?How to think about schedules, announcements, tasks and files at three, five and ten staff, including when groupware adds work instead of removing it.Working betterStay on Excel, or Move to a System?Excel is not outdated. The limits appear with simultaneous editing, approvals, history, permissions and personal data. How to decide per process.Working betterFive reasons nobody can find anything on your company driveLaptops, desktops, email attachments, USB sticks, personal cloud accounts and the NAS. When files scatter, searching takes longer and mistakes multiply. Five angles — location, naming, search, permissions and versions — and how to fix each.Working betterHow far clipboard history gets you at work, and what it must never keepBeing able to reach back for something you copied earlier pays off on boilerplate replies, email fragments, long URLs, code, customer numbers and file paths. Here are the useful cases, the things that must stay out of the history, and how to set it up.Working betterOne place for the sites and files you open every dayWhen it takes four steps to reach the page or file you need, the minutes add up quietly across a working day. Here is how to settle on a single entry point, how to arrange what goes in it, what to leave out, and how to keep it from growing.Working betterFile naming rules that a whole company can actually followAgreeing on one file name format cuts the time people spend hunting for documents. Here is a simple date-type-party-amount pattern, what belongs in the folder name instead, and how to switch over without renaming years of old files.