6 Smart Tools for Better Time Management

Time management can be one of the greatest challenges in our modern society. After all, there is more we need to manage than just our work-related tasks.

However, modern society has also made it easier for us to manage the demands it makes on our time, by coming up with all sorts of useful apps and tools to help us out.

Here is a rundown of some of the more prominent and useful ones.

Scoro

Scoro is a great app to help you keep track of time, manage your projects and tasks, and report on your work. It’s a great tool for freelancers who need to stay on top of different projects and different sets of hours.

It allows you to:

• Track hours and billable time, which you can then invoice
• Automate invoice reminders and invoice sending
• Manage clients, projects, and tasks
• Create reports on tasks, hours, productivity, and so on

Replicon

Replicon is great if you want to track your time and see where you spend most of it, but you can also use it to bill clients and manage all sorts of projects.

It helps you:

• Keep track of your time with its time tracking feature and timesheets
• Bill multiple clients from a single tool
• Manage your budget and expenses
• Analyze the use of your time, helping you make improvements

Remember The Milk

Chances are, you are working across multiple devices and every now and then, you use your laptop to do something you’d normally use your phone for, and vice versa. And, as you are also probably juggling life and several projects at the same time, Remember The Milk can help you stay on track.

It will:

• Work on all of your devices
• Sync with your email client
• Send you reminders often
• Help you never forget the milk again

Focus Booster

We all struggle to focus sometimes and keep our minds on track when there are so many other things to think about. An app like Focus Booster can help you out here, making sure you are aware of where your time is being spent and how you can better use it to get your tasks done.

This app will:

• Track your time across tasks
• Help you identify when you are procrastinating
• Tell you exactly how much time you spend being unproductive on social media

FocusMe

While we are on the subject of focus and procrastination, let’s just admit we are all guilty of checking our social media feeds and emails while we are also working on something else. In order to cut this distracting habit out of your day, you can use an app like FocusMe.

It will:

• Let you set focus times during the day
• At these times, it will block access to the websites you want to avoid
• Let you create different settings for different times

Any calendar app

But before you start using any of these apps, you can do something else that will help you identify when your most productive times are and how you can rework your schedule so that you make the best use of your time.

The calendar app you already use (such as Outlook) is full of all kinds of useful information on schedules, the time you need to do something, and is already personalized and ready to be put to good use. All you need to do is export this data from the calendar to Excel and put your thinking cap up.

Who better to realize that you don’t actually need to set aside two hours for a meeting that usually only takes up one?

Final thoughts

Remember that you are your own best time management tool. The apps and other tech are certainly there to help you, but you know yourself best. You can encourage yourself to do things differently and to reorganize your day in a way that works best for you.

Don’t listen to advice that has worked for others but that doesn’t feel right in your case. You don’t have to get up at 5AM, nor do you need to use the Pomodoro technique. If you work best late at night, reorganize your day to accommodate that.

Try out different ways to manage your time, and once you find the best option, implement it day in and day out.