Five Tips to a More Efficient Workplace

February is National Time Management Month, when business and technology users get a chance to look at how productive and effective they really are. According to research firm NFO Worldwide, American workers hold 11 million meetings every single day, with the average professional attending 60 meetings every month*.

Do you want to know what you can do to improve your productivity by up to 500%? Nitro PDF Software has recommendations on how we can become more productive and regain the time we've lost. Here are five simple tips, along with products that can help eliminate unnecessary meetings and inefficient practices using digital documents, allowing you to get more work done, faster.

Tips to a More Efficient Workplace

1. Take a signature shortcut and ditch the three P's - pen, paper, and printer: Consider the typical workflow every time you receive a document that requires your signature. From purchase orders to HR policies, workers are still subjecting themselves to the inefficient process of printing, signing, scanning, and sending. EchoSign, a leading provider of e-signature solutions, state that switching to digital signatures reduces time spent on the contract signature workflow by up to 500%**.

Let's say you sign four documents every week. With a reasonable assumption of 15 minutes to complete the entire paper-based workflow, that's up to four hours wasted - every single month. Nitro PDF Reader converts a scanned image of your handwritten signature into a convenient stamp, enabling you to sign and return documents in seconds without even leaving your chair.

Download Nitro PDF Reader (it's free!!): www.nitroreader.com

2. Bring the meeting into the document - start collaborating electronically with PDF: February often brings a calendar packed with unnecessary meetings, as workers rush to catch up after the holiday season. NFO Worldwide's Meetings in America whitepaper states that employees spend 37% of their working day in meetings. Adding insult to injury -39% of respondents admitted to falling asleep in them*!

Digital documents facilitate more efficient collaboration, allowing every participant to review and contribute simultaneously. Add sticky notes, mark-up text, reply to individual comments, and track the entire process from start to finish - from who said what to when they said it.

Nitro PDF Reader provides a full set of collaboration tools to facilitate easy electronic review. Best of all, it's 100% compatible with other common PDF solutions, so anyone can review and reply to your feedback.

3. Stop re-inventing the wheel - save time and convert PDF back to Word or Excel format for easy reuse: Stop wasting time recreating tables and retyping text when you need to update or re-purpose PDF files. With the New Year well and truly underway, you might have been asked to update that report with the final sales numbers for 2010, or perhaps you just need to remove a key section for a different audience. Either way, PDF is the final-form format of choice for business, and it's easier to edit and work with than you might have previously thought.

Nitro PDF Professional lets you convert PDF files back to Microsoft Word or Excel format, unlocking the content inside them. Customize and control the process to ensure every element - from tables to images - comes out exactly how you need it.

Download the free 14-day Nitro PDF Professional trial: http://www.nitropdf.com

4. Kill the clutter - turn paper to PDF with OCR and create easily archived, searched, and edited documents: It doesn't matter how organized your filing system is. Searching through endless folders and trays in an attempt to locate that purchase order is something most office workers are all-too-familiar with, and retyping a paragraph from that fax you've had sitting on your desk for three months takes time. With the ubiquity of efficient scanning technology alongside accurate Optical Character Recognition technology, that clumsy filing cabinet is starting to look more antiquated than ever before.

With Nitro PDF Professional OCR, you can create a digital document archive straight from your scanner that can be easily searched and edited without even leaving your seat.

Download the free 14-day Nitro PDF Professional trial: www.nitropdf.com

5. Efficiently gather and submit information electronically using PDF forms: Whether you're conducting a company-wide survey or applying for a bank loan, you'll probably come into contact with a PDF-based form. And, if you happen to be a user of the world's most ubiquitous PDF viewer, you're probably familiar with this message: "You cannot save data typed into this form. Please print a copy for your records." PDF forms used to be painful - not anymore.

Whether it's an IRS form or your child's high school permission slip, Nitro PDF Reader allows you to save PDF forms without restriction. You can even fill out static forms (without live fields) using the Type Text tool to add text anywhere on a page you need to.

Nitro PDF Professional enables you to create PDF forms from scratch, making it easy to survey, gather, and track information in one convenient format that almost anyone can open.

Download Nitro PDF Reader, free: www.nitroreader.com

Download the free 14-day Nitro PDF Professional trial: www.nitropdf.com

Sources:
*NFO Worldwide, ‘Meetings in America: A Study of Trends, Costs, and Attitudes Toward Business Travel and Teleconferencing, and Their Impact on Productivity, https://e-meetings.verizonbusiness.com/global/en/meetingsinamerica/uswhitepaper.php

**EchoSign, e-signatures 101: What You Need to Know for Success, www.echosign.com/static/EchoSign-Whitepaper.pdf