5 Data Entry Productivity Hacks To Earn More

The Gamification of A Data Entry Professional’s Life

hourly rate = (income — expenses) / time

This is the high-level framework for all business. If you are work in a company, or earn a salary, there are several layers of abstraction between your actions and the bottom line, but as a data entry professional / freelancer / or business owner this is the formula that drives you.

Every variable in this formula has a constraint.

Time is limited to 8–16 working hours a day. Income is limited by the fair market value of your services. How can we raise the ceiling?

What we need is a conceptual jump.

In data entry it’s easier to work quicker than it is to charge more. Productivity is the metric of doing more with less. In our presumptuous equation it might look a little like this.

hourly rate = (income — expenses) / (time / productivity)

A case could even be made for this formula

hourly rate = ((income * productivity) — expenses) / (time / productivity)

Logic dictates that when tasks don’t take as long we can fit more of them into a day.

5 Data Entry Productivity Hacks To Remain Competitive

1. Automation

Computers are better than you at filtering structured data. Data entry professionals in the know are leveraging modern enterprise software to turbocharge their workflows and increase their productivity.

Automating repetitive business tasks and time intensive company research is the why behind Powrbot. This clever bot crawls the internet for publicly available company data and return a csv file (spreadsheet) with everything it could find. Powrbot is not the be-all-and-end-all of data entry tasks, it can however save a significant amount of time.

In minutes Powrbot will return worthwhile information such as company revenue, number of employees, subsidiaries, products, URLs and much more. The first 200 searches in a month are completely free, so there is no reason not to give this powerful bot a chance.

2. Learn Common Search Operators

Google has 42 search operators. If you don’t know what a search operator is, try running a search with a word included in “”. Every result now has to include that word. It’s very basic syntax that customises Google’s search queries. Using OR in a search does what or does in English search for this OR that. Searches that use AND do the opposite of what and does in English (depending on the context). It’s like asking show results that satisfy the terms this AND that. It will only show results where both sides of the and operand are relevant or true.

This guide contains a complete list and learning even a few of them will drastically improve your data entry skills and your general internet surfing abilities.

3. Add a Clipboard Tool To Chrome

As a data entry professional I bet that you copy and paste A LOT. Regular copy and paste is a waste of time. The memory of the ctr-c / ctr-v is limited to one string of characters. A clipboard tool is, as the name suggests, additional memory for additional strings. You can copy multiple things and then flick over to your Excel document and then paste them all in without flicking back and forth.

If you use the chrome browser, there are a number of clipboards extensions that are completely free and available in the chrome store. Clipboard history pro is really good.

4. Invest in a Second Screen

The reason data entry takes so long is because of how we interface with technology. We have very slow bandwidth limited to between 40–60 words per minute. Unfortunately, the technology to improve this transfer of data is still in the works, but there are some steps that you can take now. A quick and easy way to improve how you interface with the internet is to buy a second screen. You can put your on one screen and have the spreadsheet or document that the information is being transferred into on the other screen. Changing tabs or windows is an information bottleneck. If you don’t have at least two screens, you are doing it wrong.

5. Create and Use Text Snippets

Often you’ll write the same word, or set of words, dozens of times on a document. When sending emails or proposals, you probably sign off the same way every single time.

A snippet tool lets you save time by remembering snippets of text and entering them into your document when you enter a special combination of characters.

Blaze is a free tool for Google Chrome that lets you configure your own snippets and use them in any browser window. Before any job, you might want to configure shortcuts for the company name, and other common words or phrases that you are going to type again and again. That little bit of pre-work could save you 10 minutes / hour. It won’t take long for that to add up to a significant increase in productivity.