3 Time Management Tools that Work
Three of My Favorite Time Management Tools to Increase Your Free Time and Cash Flow
I just finished my Women and Money Event—it was simply amazing. One of the questions I got was: “Monica, what do you use to help you with time management so you can increase your cash flow?” Brilliant question.
I love to work in the mornings and evenings where I can get a large chunk of time to batch process newsletters, videos or handouts. This allows me to knock out a whole month’s worth of work at the same time. If you do that, you can focus on sales and increasing cash flow (i.e. get more money) during your main working hours. If you need a little more support on creating new habits—please see my article: How to Get New Habits to Stick—a Guide for Women Entrepreneurs.
But when you have a 1-4 hour window, your brain can start to play tricks on you. You’ll decide to fold the laundry before you start. You might make yourself a shake to drink while you are working. You’ll spend forever picking out images when it should have only taken 20 minutes. It has to do with the fact that whenever we have a large chunk of time, our brain says, “Oh I have tons of time to work, so I don’t really have to focus. I can just float around to this and that.”
Before you know it—you’ve got 30 minutes left in your work window and you haven’t gotten nearly enough done (read: time management fail).
If this has happened to you more than once, know that you aren’t alone. Everyone struggles with managing their time—even more so when it seems like you’ve got lots of it!
But don’t stress, because there are lots of tools that help you focus, so that you can relax more and increase your cash flow. Here are 3 of my favorites:
Focus Music:
This is music with binaural beats in the background proven to help you focus. I am absolutely addicted to this type of music and it has been my saving grace on more than one occasion. Here are links to two focus music sites: www.Focusatwill.com and Brain.fm.
Focus Bar:
This is great if you tend to get distracted from working on the task in front of you. For example if you keep getting messages or people walking into your office.
This is a bar that appears at the top of your screen and reminds you of what you are working on e.g. “work on free gifts!” You can set it from least annoying (appears less often) to most annoying (appears every 30 seconds). I usually set it at most annoying. Here’s the link to focusbar (free) in the Mac app store.
Evernote:
I use Evernote to keep track of all of my notes and ideas. Evernote is a FREE virtual database software that allows you to have an unlimited number of notebooks and an unlimited number of notes in each notebook. So if I’m working on one newsletter and I get an idea for 4 more, I can quickly open my “newsletter” notebook in Evernote and put my ideas there. Or let’s say I’m writing a promotional email and there’s a whole paragraph I don’t want in the email—but I don’t want to lose it forever. I open up my “extra copy” notebook and paste it in there.
This saves so much extra time of flipping between documents, opening folders or spending time trying to go after too many ideas at once. It allows you to stay focused on one task at a time, even when other distracting ideas pop up (read: get more focus = get more money). You can find it at www.Evernote.com.
The next time you have to get more work done, I hope these tools make it so much easier. Here’s to better time management, more cash flow and more fun!
