Being your own boss is great: you have no one breathing down your neck telling you how to do things and, more importantly, tracking every minute of your day. You are free to make your own schedule and you can take breaks anytime you want. That’s great, isn’t it?
It is, until you realize that you are using your time inefficiently, never finishing your scheduled tasks on time, and always doing some overtime work on your business or postponing tasks for the next day. Over time, this way of running your business will become so inefficient that you will not notice any advantage in being an entrepreneur: either you are too busy, or your business fails.
To avoid this unfortunate situation, you need to learn one simple skill: time management. You need to understand how to organize and prioritize your daily schedule, how to focus on one single task at a time and how to avoid distractions. You are not alone on your learning path: you have lots of computer and mobile apps available which will be of great help to you in becoming a successful entrepreneur and managing your time efficiently.
Here are our top picks:
1. Toggl
Toggl is available as a free or premium service. For a single work-from-home entrepreneur, the free plan is quite sufficient. What does its app do? Once you start it, it tracks time spent on every single task. In this way, you can figure out how much each specific activity takes you. And, if you are billing your clients per time spent working for them, Toggl is a great replacement for any other timesheet software because you can prepare and print detailed reports for each day, week, month, or per tasks and clients.
2. RescueTime
It will only take a moment to check that Facebook notification… oh, look, my favorite writer retweeted my post… and there’s a new article on LinkedIn Pulse written by my former boss. All these moments add up and take away from your daily productivity, but you are not quite aware of them.
Not anymore! RescueTime monitors everything you do, both online and offline. This app tracks time spent on every website or with any task, such as reading emails or meeting a prospective client. And at the end of the day you receive a detailed report on how you spent your time. Faced with the hours and minutes spent on various distractions, you will certainly make changes in the way you spend your time every day.
3. Focus Booster
If you cannot find the inner will to organize your tasks, Focus Booster will do it for you. Built on the Pomodoro concept, this app appoints fixed time slots for each activity and alerts you when you should have finished a task. In this way, you can create a daily rhythm for your work and move from task to task without losing precious time thinking what you should be doing next.
4. Pocket
The main reason you get distracted from work is that you are afraid that if you don’t check out this website or that article right now, you will forget about them later. This will not be the case anymore once you install Pocket. This app saves every link, website, video, etc. of interest to you so that once you have finished your work you can browse them at leisure – without leaving unfinished tasks.
5. News Feed Eradicator for Facebook
This app is the most extreme measure you should take if you are simply unable to get away from your Facebook Timeline. Once you install and activate it, News Feed Eradicator will blur out your Facebook newsfeed and replace it with a random inspirational quote, such as “Time is money”.
Now that you know about these time management apps, you have all the tools you need to structure your day’s work and maintain a good balance between working on your business and your personal life.