I stumbled over a mindboggling fact the other day. I read a quote from a report surveying 10,500 office workers in 11 countries, saying that one quarter of their annual work time was spent doing repetitive tasks in the office like manually inputting data, managing e-mail, and filing documents.

Now think about that for a minute. That is more than a day of your average work week!

Of course, these things need doing. But think of the potential!

At the same time, a lot of small business owners I talk to are stressed for time. But how do you best release that potential for yourself?

The way I see it, there are three main ways here how small business owners could approach this:

• Outsourcing to another company
• Hiring an assistant
• Office automation

Do you think these are all equally feasible for small businesses? Which one would you concentrate on?

Here is another detail that I see small businesses struggle with: the basis of all of the above or at least the latter two is having systems in place. After all, handing things over to an assistant or a robot, you want to make sure that they are following best practices consistently.