Everyone knows that new businesses need a lot of resources to succeed, but many people often overlook the most important resource of all – time. You may be able to do everything that needs to be done to keep your business running smoothly, but if you’re working 20-hour days to keep up, eventually either your business or your health is going to suffer.
Part of being successful is learning when and how to use tools to make your job easier. With that in mind, we’d like to introduce you to five services that can help you streamline your processes and give you more time to get real work done – or just to kick back and relax!
Solo is a no-nonsense project management tool. It’s still in Beta, so some of the features are a bit rough around the edges, but it’s already shaping up to be a great tool for managing your clients, time, and finances. Solo lets you add and organize projects, group projects together by client, track time and more. It also lets you calculate quotes and prepare invoices, keeping the project together from start to finish. The best part – it’s designed for freelancers, which means there is finally a robust project management system intended for one user.
Lift works on a very simple principle – choose the habits you want to reinforce, make a list of them inside the app, tap the screen each day when you do them. It’s simple, easy, and a good way to hold yourself accountable for improving your life. Lift keeps track of what you do and don’t do, and gives you reports indicating how you’re doing. It also lets you connect with your friends and congratulate and encourage each other.
ServiceTask is a web app that lets you manage your service-based business with incredible ease. Its drag-and-drop calendar lets you easily create schedules, assign employees or crews to certain tasks, quickly change job dates or times, and much more! Customer information is organized on a “dashboard” that lets you keep quotes, pending jobs, call notes and any other information accessible in one place.
Scoreboard gives you and your employees a central place to track everyone’s time and expenses for all of your projects. This app also keeps track of what you’ve charged to services in the past, so it’s easy to put together new quotes or add to existing projects. Scoreboard also lets you create invoices and then download or email them, or even invite clients to view them easily online.
Like Lift, WorkFlowy sticks to doing one thing and doing it well. The video on the homepage describes it best – “a single piece of paper that can hold your entire brain.” In essence, it’s the ultimate outline tool, letting you dump all of your organizational notes onto the page, starting with general topics and then “zooming in” on each one individually (which removes all other topics form the page and adds to the breadcrumb trail at the top of the page.) A simple plus and minus system lets you show and hide more specific notes as needed, and tag and search functions ensure you never misplace information.
These are, of course, just a few of the myriad of time-saving tools that are out there. Do you have a favorite that’s not here? Share it with us in the comments below!
