In today’s world of multitasking, one person can take on the role of what has been traditionally the job of several different people. Unfortunately, there are still only 24 hours in a day, so this means that the average person has to be more efficient than they have ever been just to get all their tasks done on time.

With this is mind, I’ve come up with the following three tips that I use to save time at work so I can devote more time to my important tasks:

Maximize your computer boot-up and login - How long does it take for your computer to be at the point where you can start working? For me, it takes a good five minutes to boot up, login, and then have my laptop reach that point. Do I sit there and watch it? Absolutely not. Instead, I use this time to get my morning Diet Pepsi (or Mountain Dew if I really didn’t get any sleep). This way, it doesn’t cost me any work time to get that drink because I can’t do any work until my computer is up and running.

Cut down staple time - Luckily for us cubicle slaves, most copiers have an auto-staple option. However, the copier at my office isn’t a color copier, so if I need color copies I basically need to print as many as I need on the color printer. This can be quite a pain, especially when you are making a lot of packets (think: many, many hand stapled packets). To cut down on the time this stapling takes out of my schedule, I will start stapling before all the copies are done. For example, if I’m printing out 100 pages for 25 packets, I’ll take 20 pages at a time and make those packets while the rest are printing.

Use water bottles over cups - When I’m not chugging down caffeine, I’m drinking water like it’s going out of style. I used to constantly keep going back and forth to the water cooler filling up little cups of water, wasting a bunch of my time. Now, I buy a big bottle of water in the morning for $0.50 and then just re-fill it all day. Over the course of the day, this saves me a significant amount of time.

While these tips don’t sound like they would save you a lot time individually, when added together they add up to big time savings.

These are just three examples of ways I save time over the day, I’m sure that if you sit down and think about it, there are tons of ways that you can make your day more efficient.