As a CEO, you rarely seem to have enough time to juggle the tasks needed to run your business successfully. With so many deadlines and obligations and only 24 hours in a day, you often find yourself strategically yet frantically planning how to spend your limited time.
You aren’t alone.
Many CEOs make huge sacrifices for their careers and struggle with creating a good work-life balance. While running your business is very important, other tasks are just as important, such as getting enough sleep, spending time with friends and family, and caring for your mental and physical well-being. If you don’t find the right work-life balance, you could easily get burned out, be less productive, and negatively affect your relationships with the people who mean the most to you.
How can you manage your time and check off everything on your to-do list? Moving quickly from one task to the next, staying focused on the task in front of you, and prioritizing definitely helps but having an awesome team and the tools to help you with this is key.
Here are some of the best time management tools for CEOs.
1. Slack
Pricing Plans for Slack: Free – $12.50+ per month
Slack is a popular internal communication tool with some extensive features. Slack makes it easy to chat with your team, arrange calls, set reminders, exchange documents and files, manage your to-do lists, as well as helping you with other issues. Slack is easy to use and allows for flexible remote collaboration, which makes it an effective communication tool and a fun way to work together.
Here are some of the features and benefits of Slack:
Channels keep projects organized
Allows you to easily work together on a project with an external company
Easy communication with team members, including face-to-face chat
One place to ask a question or make a decision on a project
2. ProofHub
Pricing: From $45 per month
ProofHub is an all-in-one project management system that comes with features that eliminate the need for having multiple apps and tools to effectively run your business. It’s been used by big brands, including Disney, Nike, and NASA. It allows you to plan and present project-related information in an organized way. You could also assign tasks, share crucial details, and capture every step of the project in one place. It will help you get a real clear idea of what needs to be done as well as which task is a priority.
Here are some of the features and benefits of ProofHub:
Task management for teams so they are more organized, productive, and less stressed out
Eliminate long email threads by creating discussion topics and bring all your team and client discussions to one place
Visualize and plan how pieces of your project fit together in a timeline
Mobile app available for iOS and Android users
Save time during the feedback or sharing process using the online proofing software
3. Google Alerts
Pricing: Free
Google Alerts is a service that detects a change in content and sends emails to you when it finds new results that match your set search terms. It searches web pages, newspaper articles, blogs, and scientific articles and journals. It’s easy to use and saves you time.
Here are some of the features and benefits of Google Alerts:
Track your online presence
Get updates on your competitors’ activities
Stay up to date with important topics that keep you in the know in your industry
Set up multiple alerts and choose how often you receive them
4. Hootsuite
Pricing: From $49 per month
Managing all your social media accounts in one place is easy with Hootsuite. As a CEO, it’s important to maintain your online presence not just on your company blog but also on the most popular social networks. Hootsuite gives you the ability to schedule posts up to a week in advance, saving you time. You could also track engagement, browse news feeds, reply to messages, and see reports and analytics.
Here are the features and benefits of Hootsuite:
Create new posts and schedule on multiple social networks at the same time
Monitor your posts and messages and get an overview of all of your social media channels
View upcoming scheduled content, fill content gaps, map out campaigns, and collaborate in real-time
Interact with your users from different networks in a simple single stream
Respond to questions or comments, boost positive reactions, and share messages with teammates with just a single click
Measure performance across all your social networks and create reports to show the impact on your company and revenue
5. Harvest
Pricing: From $12 /month + $10/month for each additional user
Harvest is a popular time tracking and billing software that allows you to accurately track the amount of time spent on a project then convert that into an invoice to send to your clients. With less effort and improved profitability, it’s no wonder why large companies like McDonald’s and Dell use them. This software is a great tool to help you save time and work more efficiently and increase profits.
Here are some of the features and benefits of Harvest:
Track time as you work for more accurate cost and time spent on a project
Desktop and mobile apps for time tracking anywhere
Track time from the tools you currently use for productivity
Get insight to improve performance with the wide selection of visual reports help you support your team and keep projects running smoothly
Easily convert tracked time and expenses into invoices for your clients and get paid quickly with Stripe and Paypal integrations.
Streamline your workflow with their dozens of integration options
6. Scoro
Pricing: Starting at $26
Scoro is a time management tool that allows you to plan and prioritize your work and avoid overlaps. It also helps manage your time more efficiently with shared calendars, timesheets, and a time tracker. Scoro will also track billable and non-billable hours to accurately charge for the hours spent on a project.
Here are some of the features and benefits of Scoro:
Track up-to-date progress, tasks, dependencies, events, and more
Quickly adapt and see how delays, changes, or logged hours impact your plans
Ability to track profitability in real time, compare budgets to actual results, accurately predict, and keep profit margins on target
Speed up processes by turning quotes into assigned projects, tasks, and more
Pre-set project templates and task bundles to save time repeating the process
Optimize your team’s utilization by defining individual capabilities, and allocate resources based on availability
Keep track of purchases, orders, and costs, and compare budget scenarios to actual costs and profits
7. RescueTime
Pricing: Free–$12 per month
RescueTime offers an automatic time tracking tool that helps you stay
on track and productive. It also offers distraction blocking, which is a CEO’s
dream to accomplish more in less time. Keep track of time spent in
meetings and calls to prioritize your time.
Here are some of the features and benefits of RescueTime:
Real-time focus alerts
Distraction blocking
Project and document time tracking
Productivity reports
Offline time reporting, including calls and meetings
8. My Life Organized
Pricing: Free–$59.95
My Life Organized allows you to create to-do lists for new tasks and checklists easily. It will help you prioritize your tasks and time for increased productivity. Using to-do lists ensures you maintain a healthy work-life balance.
Here are some of the features and benefits:
Easy to use drag-and-drop interface that allows you to easily rearrange and prioritize tasks
Break tasks into sub-tasks
Automatically generate a list of items that require your immediate attention
Location-based reminders that will send you reminders when you arrive at a certain location
Syncs all of your devices for up to date info wherever you are
Sync with Google Calendar
The Takeaway
As a CEO, time is your most valuable asset. Get more of it by utilizing time management tools that work best for you and your organization. These tools will help you use your time wisely by prioritizing what you spend your time on and how much time you spend on it. They will also help your team work better together on a project and increase productivity. With increased productivity organization within your company, you will be able to accomplish more in less time to increase profits and have a better work-life balance.
Are you looking to build a high-functioning, long-lasting team to scale your business and take it to the next level? Call Pocketbook Agency, and we’ll bring you the incredible talent you need.
Sources:
https://www.fastcompany.com/90354641/work-life-balance-for-ceos