More hours in the day. It’s something that just about everyone wants but it can sometimes feel unobtainable. It’s also something that you shouldn’t want. You should instead be focusing on better time management.

Good time management unlocks many benefits. Working smarter and not harder is the goal, protecting your mind and body from working overtime. Stress is natural and normal, but too many people are experiencing high levels of stress far too often. The impact this can have on overall health can lead to serious implications.

Good time management comes from organising your time intelligently. Productivity tools can help with this by aiding you to complete tasks faster. Some productivity tools can even automate tasks, allowing you to reserve your time for where it matters most.

11 productivity tools to help you work smarter

ProofHub

When working on or managing projects it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and disorganised. ProofHub is an all-in-one project and task management tool that helps you to communicate more effectively, increase accountability, and keep everyone on the same page. With ProofHub you can assign tasks to specific people, upload files and documents to organise the workflow, and monitor time spent on each process of the project.

Calendar

By syncing with other calendar tools and devices, Calendar can learn your schedule and take over organising, scheduling and updating meetings and events. It allows you to share and designate access to your calendar, gain insights into how you spend your time, and send customised calendar links to anyone.

HubSpot’s Marketing Hub

Creating marketing campaigns that are consistently high quality is made easier with HubSpot’s Marketing Hub and you can quickly start turning visitors into leads. Connected to HubSpot’s all-in-one CRM tool, your team can control your customer’s journey from the moment they visit your site, providing customers with a seamless end-to-end experience. Each customer’s interactions are stored and shared among your teams to ensure every member can view, engage, and connect with any potential customer. Create ads, emails, forms, and landing pages all within the same software.

Chanty

With Chanty, you can quickly get in touch with your colleagues in private, public, group and one-on-one conversations. The Teambook menu allows you to keep all your messages, files, links and tasks in order, and turn team chats into a command centre.

Google Docs, Sheets and Slides

Even when there’s no internet connection, Google Docs, Sheets and Slides let you create, write, add, edit and collaborate. This means you can all work together, no matter where you are in the world. Choose from a variety of pre-made templates to make work life even easier and benefit from autosaving. No more lost work because you got distracted!

Toggl Track

If you sell your time, Toggl Track helps you to get the numbers right, every time. Plan and set budgets with confidence, quickly spot trends, and see at a glance where you and your team spend time. Filter time entries by project and team or view by date to create insightful reports that can be shared with ease.

Simplenote

Keeping track of every little thing can be difficult and time-consuming. Simplenote is a note-taking application that simplifies all your little memos to self. You can tag notes to easily find things, view note history in order of when you made them, share your notes, make voice notes, create checklists and organise your life with no extravagant features.

Sanebox

We all get too many emails. Some don’t need to be read, let alone interrupt your day. Sanebox’s AI makes sure that only the important emails stay in your inbox, prioritising your email with smart filtering. It also saves your attachments to the cloud and can snooze emails when you don’t want to be distrurbed.

MindMeister

Mind mapping tools like MindMeister are helpful for visualising data, planning projects, and brainstorming ideas. It can be used by just you or with a team to collaborate in real time and the tool includes a bunch of pre-set map themes for even more time saving. As your map takes shape, add context to topics with attachments, embedded media and more.

Hootsuite

If you run multiple social channels, Hootsuite lets you schedule posts and campaigns across them all. Once planned and scheduled, you can view them in a single comprehensive calendar, which is extremely helpful for aligning your campaigns, organising your social channels, and seeing the bigger picture of your social content.

Due

If you forget things easily and would benefit from a prompt when something is due, Due will give you a nudge. Set due dates and reminders and choose when to receive notifications. Once received, you can snooze or dismiss the notification.

Scheduling tech-free time

Technology can make work easier and can help you to work smarter, but it can also be a huge distraction. Control your devices, tools and apps to minimise notifications and alerts that don’t serve any immediate purpose. Also make time to step away from technology. Your brain needs time to catch up and refocus on each new task and taking a short tech detox each day will help to maintain attention and complete tasks more efficiently.

Choose from a variety of pre-made templates to make work life even easier and benefit from autosaving. No more lost work because you got distracted! Apart from Google Docs & Sheets, one can also think about incorporating and integrating marketing dashboards or analytics dashboards into an existing system for clearly identifying the key spots and areas in business that need improvement. Here, a specialist like “Marketing Reports” can help design and implement one such online dashboard for monitoring the vital metrics in order to achieve long-term business goals.

Remember, better time management means also scheduling time for yourself.