Mike McDerment – CEO and co-founder of Fresbooks.com – wrote Breaking The Time Barrier: How to Unlock Your True Earning Potential. And now, thanks to technology — and while you are still working to get to the level that Mike intends to see you at – there are some great ways to manage your time.
Here are 7 web-based time management tools available and why each of these is good for you:
FindmyShift
Here’s one problem with doing business on the cloud: the “pay-as-you-go” or a small fixed fee per month for using any of the apps you’d tend to use for your business will all soon add up. A $30 here and a $99 there will soon escalate into thousands per month. Depending on the size of your team, you are likely to be paying in thousands of dollars. Now, the cloud doesn’t seem to be cheap anymore, does it?
At least for time tracking for teams, FindMyShift comes in with plans that won’t punish for managing small or large teams. It just throws “per user fee” out of the window. Manage time tracking and scheduling for teams of “any size” for just $33 per month.
The “per seat” or “per user” fee might make sense for a few products and services. But for managing teams, tracking time, and scheduling, it seems like businesses have to pay more as team size grows. Prudence is critical for businesses today. Findmyshift helps you track time, schedule projects, and do more using “price per schedule” system.
Freshbooks
Since I mentioned Mike McDerment, freshbooks.com was on the top of my mind. While it was built to be an invoicing solution, it does have a robust time-tracking module built right into it. Track your time on desktop, laptop, tablet, or phone and ensure that you get paid for your time.
You can also monitor time for your team, track work progress, and team performance. Plus, you can choose to bill your clients per hour or a flat rate, depending on how you roll.
Toggl
Chances are that you might be a self-employed professional working for yourself with or without the help of a team. Either way, you have a vested interest in getting more productive and getting more done during the day.
Toggl promises an insanely simple approach (on desktop and/or mobile) to track your entire workday, as it flows. Enter task. Track time. That’s all you have to do. If you forget tracking, enter time using the manual mode.
Self-employed professionals, agencies, freelancers, and businesses of all kinds depend on their time and services rendered for money.
Tracking time and knowing how your day has been spent is a great way to scrutinize your own work habits (or that of your team). Toggl is free, and it’s free from clutter.
Harvest App
Harvest App is simple, efficient, and it can be almost everywhere you are at.
While it is a time tracking app, it also provides you with seamless invoicing (directly or integrate with other apps such as Xero and Intuit Quickbooks), project estimates, robust security, privacy settings, team collaboration (including clients), and a powerful reporting feature.
Harvest App gives you a way to stay on top of your budgets and expenses. A new Harvest feature called “Forecast” allows you to map out a plan for your team, get everyone on the same page, and project your workflows into the future.
Fanurio
If you had to divide your work hours into billable and non-billable, which one turns out to be more in number? If you are like most people, your non-billable hours might just turn out to be more. That’s a huge loss (as long as you manage to get some life outside of billable hours).
Fanurio is a time tracking software build especially for freelancers that lets you analyze your work, plan your projects, track your time, use it on multiple devices, and keep all the data ready for you to dig into when you ought to.
It nudges you to record time, in case you let that slip.
RescueTime
One thing we don’t have is time. And that’s also the one thing we have a responsibility to salvage.
The digital world is distracting. You’ll need a way to keep your sanity about while getting work done. RescueTime is a simple app that promises you a distraction free and a workday you can account for.
While it runs in the background, it tracks time spent on applications and websites to give you an accurate picture of how you spent your day. It also alerts you to how much time you spend on anything while giving you options to shut down applications or sites you don’t want to spend on.
ATracker
What if you were paranoid enough about your time that you want to see how your entire “life” is spent? How about doing that with a smartphone – the one device that you’ll even go to bed with?
ATracker is a mobile app that lets you track time for everything you spend – from shopping to waiting in lines at airport security; from email to actual work hours; from talking on the phone to just socializing on the web.
Which of these apps are you currently using to track time? Do you have any recommendations?
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Mark Feldman is the chief technology officer at Findmyshift.com that helps customers easily schedule employee shifts using their web based application through which sharing employee schedules online with your employees becomes seamless.
