Making money online requires that you spend time working on your websites, social media and other marketing tasks. It requires effort – but it is well worth it. If you want to get ahead with your money making efforts, you need to be a good steward of your time. Nowhere are there more distractions than online. From email messages coming in, to social media updates to blogs and websites, it’s easy to get off task when you’re working online. The following five tools can help you get more out of each day so you can see better results more quickly from your online business.
Using Freckle can help you track your time and also organize your team if you are outsourcing tasks to other people. Freckle has all of the features that you’d expect from a robust time tracking utility, but it also has a nice “Pulse” page that gives you an “at a glance” view of how you and your team are spending your time. You can hover over pie charts that represent team members’ activities and see where their time is being spent. You can narrow down your view by tasks, projects and tags so you can view how time is being spent. Freckle is $14/mo for personal users and tracks up to 10 projects. Other membership plans are available as well.
If you’re serious about productivity, RescueTime is for you – just as the homepage says. RescueTime doesn’t allow you to slip up when it comes to time tracking. The system installs a small tracking program on your computer and it “watches” which programs you use and which websites you are visiting. You can’t trick RescueTime – it gives an honest and accurate reflection of how you are actually spending your time. RescueTime has a free version and is $6 to $9 per month for extra features to help you manage your time.
Toggl features one click time tracking that you can use in order to increase your productivity. You can change between tasks and add time to different types of tasks with the click of a button. In addition to allowing you to switch easily between timers, you can also get comprehensive reports on how you are spending your time. Like Freckle, Toggl also allows you the ability to add team members to a project. Toggl offers a free option and has five paid options.
yaTimer gives you a window display where you can see exactly how you’re splitting time between tasks. Your tasks are color coded so you can keep them organized. The timer system lets you add details to your tasks so you know exactly what took place during that period of time. yaTimer comes with a free two week trial and then costs just $49.95 for a year’s subscription.
Tick is a web-based solution that you login to and use to track your time. One of the best features of the program is that it allows you to budget time on a per project basis. If you want to spend a specific amount of time on article submissions you can set a budget for that and make sure you’re staying on track. Toggl offers options for tracking by task, projects or team member. Tick offers plans for free all the way up to $79/mo for large businesses.
Any of these solutions will help you stay more organized and get more out of your time online.