4 Ways That Modern Technology Can Help You to Streamline Your Life as a Construction Contractor

As a construction contractor, you likely find that your life is about as hectic as you can manage. Not only do you have to juggle your contracts, themselves, but you also need to handle admin tasks and try find a bit of work-life balance into the bargain.

Fortunately, modern technology can go a very long way to helping you streamline your life.

By massively reducing the time you spend on admin tasks for work

Whatever it is that you might do for a living, you are all but certain to spend a considerable chunk of your total time during any given month on dealing with what might be called “professional matters”. This is just as true for a construction business as it is for any other type of job.

But the time that we invest in our work should be repaid, both financially, and in terms of job fulfilment, increased skills and credentials, and so on.

Many of us, on the contrary, find that a huge chunk of the time we spend “working” is actually drained away on admin tasks that could, in many cases, be handled by a computer or an unskilled worker, but which nonetheless are required in order for us to perform the tasks that we are actually specialised in.

As a construction contractor, your specialty is doing the actual work of building something, not writing endless memos and proposals about what it is you can do for your client.

Fortunately, modern technologies and services can cut down on the admin time involved in all sorts of work, to a huge degree. With services such as RapidBid, for example, construction contractors can takeoff onscreen and shave hours off of their day.

By allowing you to keep on top of your finances in just a few minutes a day

Financial issues are at the heart of much, if not most of, the stress we tend to experience throughout the course of everyday life.

No matter how “on top of things” you might be, it’s easy to lose track of your budget, or the state of your finances, at any given moment — not least of all if a sudden, unexpected expense strikes out of the blue.

As a construction contractor, or as the owner of a construction company, you need to be a master of financial management. Tax issues or mis-judged expenses are always lurking on the horizon to sabotage your professional well-being.

Reactive financial apps such as YNAB, that rely on zero-based-budgeting principles, allow you to stay on top of your budget in just a few minutes a day, while other services such as Quickbooks make logging work expenses vastly more straightforward than would otherwise be the case.

By giving you the tools to track all of your tasks and projects so that you can free up space in your head

David Allen, creator of the famous “Getting Things Done” productivity and project-management method, argues that the mind is great at generating ideas, but very bad at storing them. Allen goes on to argue that it’s the attempt to keep all of our projects and tasks organised mentally than drives much of the disorganisation, stress, and anxiety, that haunts us through life.

It’s for this reason that project and task-management tools that allow us to get these ideas out of our heads and into a system can work absolute wonders in terms of making us more efficient in our dealings, not to mention more content with the course of our lives in general.

When construction is your business, you have a lot of specifics to remember, and details to address, during any given project. Relying on your memory is an unreliable strategy, and it’s not practical to continually ask other members of your team what still needs to be done, or to keep opening up your laptop and reviewing your plans throughout the day.

Try out tools such as Nozbe, Trello, and Microsoft To-Do, which allow you to apply efficient project and task management principles, using nothing but your phone.

By helping you to take up, and track, positive habits without having to work out all the fine details yourself

You might have a good sense that you really should start an exercise routine, or even begin a regular meditation practice.

The only issue is that you aren’t really all that sure where to begin, and you don’t have the time or inclination to construct an entire regimen out of scratch.

Work in construction can be notoriously tiring, and having the right habits lined up to help you support your physical and mental health can be extremely important.

Modern apps such as Calm, for meditation, or FitBit Coach, for workouts-on-the-go, can resolve this issue by allowing you to get started forming these habits, while learning on the go, and without the need to become an expert from the very beginning.