It's almost too much of a cliché to say that time is money, but any entrepreneur knows the old adage is true. When running a business, time and how you manage it can make you or break you. There are only so many hours in each day, and if you mismanage those hours, your business could be losing valuable resources and opportunities.
Luckily, in these glorious days of the internet, there are a variety of tools to help you boost your productivity so that you don't waste your valuable time. We've combed through the bulk of them and compiled a list for you so you can efficiently manage your busy day.
Google Drive
With word processing, spreadsheets, calendars, cloud storage, and more, the Google Drive suite is a must-use for any new entrepreneur. You can work online and off and pick up where you left off on any device.
It's also great to use with teams. You can set up a drive for use by your company and have multiple people edit documents, access storage, or edit calendar events anytime. You can even set up meetings with your whole team using Google Hangouts. Best of all, most features of Google Drive are completely free, although there is a monthly fee to access more cloud storage.
Toggl
Toggl is a time tracker app that allows you to record the hours you spend on different tasks. It's super simple and intuitive. Just click the Toggl button, and you're off to the races.
It's an excellent tool for anyone from freelancers up to large teams. You can track the time you spend on your projects and make sure you're getting enough money for the effort that you put in. It allows you to turn your entries into invoices, track insights, and stay accountable with your team.
FreedCamp
FreedCamp is a free project management app that goes above and beyond. It's a nifty tool for creating task lists, organizing your calendar, holding discussions with your team, and time tracking, all in one place. You can even set up your organization's wiki with company documents that your whole team can access.
FreedCamp is great for small to medium-sized businesses and freelancers. It helps you stay organized and manage your projects with ease.
Boomerang
We all crave work-life balance, but sometimes entrepreneurs have to keep working past business hours to get things done, even if the rest of your team keeps a regular schedule. Got a message to send to your team at 3 am, but don't want to play the overbearing boss who bombards them with messages after hours? Boomerang can help.
This Gmail add-on can schedule your emails to send at different times. Now you can send out missive after missive late into the night or on weekends and have them arrive in your team's inbox during normal business hours. You can even schedule meetings and share availability through your messages.
Todo Cloud
This award-winning digital task management app can help you manage and knock out tasks like a pro. With Todo Cloud, you can create checklists, build projects, and track your progress. If you use Todo Cloud on your mobile device, you can get reminders to set up your daily planning at specific times of the day.
You can also set reminders to alert you of checklists, tasks, projects at any scheduled time or when you pass by the grocery store or head to the office. The only downside is that it requires a subscription to sync across all your devices and a different subscription for business teams.
RescueTime
Much like Toggl, RescueTime is a time-tracking tool, but with more features. With RescueTime Premium, you can turn off distractions like social media or news for as long as it takes to focus and finish up your work. You'll have access to smart goals, productivity reports, and offline time reporting.
They have plans for teams as well, so you and your whole crew can get to work. Additionally, RescueTime offers a four-week productivity course to help you learn to get more done.
EverNote
Notes are an entrepreneur's best friend. With EverNote, you can record all your brainstorms, draw diagrams, and store photos and articles for later viewing. It's a total game-changer when it comes to organizing your business.
You can even take photos of business receipts and easily organize them. With EverNote Webclipper, you can clip any parts of websites you visit and store them for later viewing. You can also make task lists, add reminders, and sync your email.
If you're using the free version of Evernote, you can only sync your note to two devices. With Premium EverNote, you can sync to unlimited devices.
IFTTT
To get the most out of your productivity, you need a control room behind all the action. IFTTT (If This, Then That) is a perfect way to sync apps and devices while taking away a lot of the busywork of technology. IFTTT allows your apps to automatically perform tasks based on scheduled rules or "recipes."
For example, you can use recipes to schedule social media posts, organize your email, create to-do lists, and more. You can even schedule a reminder on your phone to bring your umbrella whenever it's raining. The sky's truly the limit on what you can perform with IFTTT.
MeetEdgar
If you're looking to stay on top of the social media game, MeetEdgar is just the tool for you. You can easily schedule social media posts so that you have content going up whenever you need.
MeetEdgar is the ideal tool for freelancers and small businesses trying to get their leg up. If you run out of new updates, MeetEdgar will repost older content automatically, so you're always staying in it to win it. You can even track performance data and monitor your engagement using MeetEdgar. It is a paid subscription, but you get a lot of bang for your buck.
360 Legal Forms
360 Legal Forms is home to an exhaustive library of forms and templates every business owner needs. By providing the framework for invoices, contracts, partnership agreements, business plans, bylaws, human resource forms, and more, 360 Legal Forms can save tons of time and legal fees when starting your new business or managing an existing one.
MindNode
For visual brainstorming, MindNode is where it's at. MindNode can help you take your abstract ideas and turn them into organized thoughts through diagrams and visual maps.
It's an excellent tool for brainstorming, outlining ideas, project management, and presentations. You can break a project down into tasks and keep track of your progress as you complete items. Once you've created your mind maps on the app, you can even export them into a number of formats for other apps like Photoshop and Keynote.
Focus@Will
These days, countless distractions, from social media to Wikipedia holes, can prevent you from focusing on your tasks. Focus@Will uses neuroscience to create personalized music to help you improve concentration, stay productive, and keep focused. Studies indicate a 200-400% increase in focus with most active users of focus@will, and the average productivity in a one-hour focus@will session is a whopping 75%. It can even improve your mood.
If you're someone who struggles with distractions, focus@will could be your new best friend. A one-year subscription costs $52.49, but the one-week free trial will show you that focus@will means business.
Take Your Small Business Skills to the Next Level
Using any of the tools mentioned above can improve your productivity in no time. Best of all, you can start using any of them today. Choose the ones that will work best for you, and start boosting your productivity!
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Ready to take your entrepreneurship to the next level? Check out 15 Free Online Entrepreneur Classes to Upgrade Your Small Business Skills. If you're a woman taking the world by storm, try 5 Tips on How to Be a Successful Female Entrepreneur.
