As a business owner, there are many areas of your business that demand your attention. You have emails to check, team members to respond to, finance and business operations tasks to attend to. Being able to manage your time and resources effectively will help you to be even more efficient, and ultimately more successful.
Establishing a streamlined workflow by putting systems in place will help you to know exactly where to find what you need, and drive up productivity across your business. We looked at many different apps and tools, and here are six of the best time management tools for business owners that we found in today’s environment.
- Toggl
The first step in increasing efficiency is figuring out where your time is going. Toggl is a time tracking app that has a simple, easy-to-use interface and integrates with many different project management platforms. You can integrate your Google Calendar to track the amount of time you spend in meetings each week, and set up auto-tracking to trigger time entry suggestions based on the software you’re currently using.
Top features:
- Unlimited projects, clients, & tags
- Simple but powerful interface
- Integrates with apps like Notion, Trello, Slack, & dozens more
- Idle time detection
Pricing: Free for up to 5 users, $9 per user / month after that
- Notion
Notion is an extremely customizable all-in-one workspace for you and your teams. You can create a company wiki (a type of knowledge management software: an updatable source of internal company information), collaborate with others on a content calendar, use the Kanban feature to manage tasks, and much more. It can take some time to set up Notion the way you want, but once you do, you’ll have a centralized system for your documents, projects, and future initiatives.
Top features:
- Flexible system to customize however you need
- Extensive template gallery with community-sourced templates being added often
- Easy collaboration with internal teams or clients
- Project management, wiki, and task management in one
Pricing: Free for individual users, $8 per user / month for teams
- Google Calendar
Your Google Calendar can be a powerful tool for managing not only your meetings and events, but your tasks as well! By using a time blocking strategy and designating specific time blocks for checking emails or working on specific projects, you can be sure that you’re using your time more wisely.
You can also use themes for each day to ensure you’re focusing on different areas of your business for those days. For example, Mondays can be for catching up on emails and reaching out to new vendors or partners, Tuesdays can be content days, Wednesdays can be for thinking about new initiatives and events, etc.
Top features:
- Add multiple calendars for one view
- Automatically decline meetings to block out time
- Advanced search functionality
Pricing: Free
- HoneyBook
Keep your proposals, scheduling, and invoices in one place with HoneyBook. Having everything in one place, where you can manage projects, send invoices, and get paid, helps to streamline your processes, and saves you a lot of time. With HoneyBook, you can automate workflows, such as automatically sending an email if an invoice hasn’t been paid after a certain number of days, or creating a task that’s triggered when a client does pay.
Top features:
- Automated workflows
- File management with clients
- Integrations with other tools
- Contract templates you can save and easily send
Pricing: $39 per month
- Slack
Email can take up a lot of your time and isn’t always the best option for internal communications. Slack calls itself the app that replaces email, and it’s easy to communicate with your team, and even clients, with the app.
You can also streamline a lot of other tools to work within Slack, such as adding files easily from Drobox, Google Drive, or your computer, or creating tasks with the Asana or Wrike integrations. If you need to remind yourself to do something, you can just set a reminder within Slack, and you’ll get a notification when it’s time to complete the task.
Top features:
- Pin messages and links to channels for easier reference
- Advanced search through Slack messages
- Set reminders for yourself and others
- Many integrations with other productivity apps
Pricing: Free
- Spark
If you don’t want to get rid of email completely with Slack, you can consolidate multiple email inboxes with the Spark mail app. With an easy-to-use interface, Spark is a great way to see emails from multiple email addresses and sort them into different folders or priorities. You can snooze emails, so they’ll come back to the top of your inbox later, or pin them to save your emails.
With Spark, you can also collaborate with your team members with a comments feature on emails. It’s a great way to draft an email as a team, or assign tasks to team members based on the emails that come in.
Top features:
- Email templates for faster responses
- Private team comments
- Snooze feature for emails
- Email delegation
- Smart search feature
Pricing: Free
Take stock of the tools you’re currently using. Are there any that aren’t helping you to be more productive? Are there tools on this list that you can add to increase productivity? Once you have a system in place and set up automated workflows, you’ll be able to free up time to focus on the parts of your business you enjoy the most, in addition to making your team even more productive.
For more help with growing your business and accelerating your results, reach out to me today and schedule your complimentary consultation.
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Do you feel like your business has plateaued or you are sick and tired of being sick and tired? Could you use a shot in the arm to make even more progress on your goals? Consider working with The Accountability Coach. I’m here to help you accelerate your results, so you can enjoy your ideal business and ideal life!
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