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10 Companies That Want To Help You Find More Free Time

This article is more than 7 years old.

If the first quarter of this year wasn’t the most productive for you, it’s probably safe to say that some of the biggest time-wasters that stole productivity from you seemed necessary at the time.

Others – like Facebook, Reddit, Netflix – maybe not so much. But whatever the balance is that you’re looking for, if you’re not finding it, it’s time for a change. I’m a big fan of little life hacks that help you get more time out of your day, but there comes a point when you have to call in reinforcements.

There’s plenty of help out there, with some 53 million freelancers available for contract work, plus the vast number of apps and companies built for the sole purpose of helping you find more free time in your schedule.

Here are 10 of my favorites:

1. When I Work

Focus: Timekeeping

For small businesses and those who have hourly employees, you can spend a hell of a lot of time building out employee schedules, managing schedule changes, tracking hours, logging payroll, making sure employees are where they need to be on time, and just trying to keep a work schedule flowing.

Nothing makes scheduling easier than a tool like When I Work. This service makes it easy to create and manage your schedule while communicating with employees and keeping everyone accountable. With mobile integration, your team has the schedule in their pocket so changes can be handled on the fly and you can spend more time growing your business – or by the pool.

2. Buffer

Focus: Content marketing

Content marketing is extraordinarily powerful when it comes to consumer engagement and brand visibility, but it can also take a lot of time: time that could be better spent on other things. Buffer simplifies the process of finding and sharing articles via social media.

Just log into Buffer, connect your social accounts, schedule the content sharing times, and you’re set. Throughout your workday you just hit the Buffer bookmarklet button and the content is automatically added to your queue. That queued up content is then shared to your accounts at the designated times.

"Directing people to what I believe to be the most worthy social and content marketing resources every day—for years—is how I built my business,” says Jay Baer, author of Youtility. “Buffer makes that process of sharing information to audiences so much easier.”

3. 15Five

Focus:  Employee engagement

Employee engagement should never be seen as a time waster, but it can definitely eat up serious resources and time. You need to develop programs for improving engagement and staying actively involved with your team, but balance and moderation is necessary.

15Five helps you get more done without sacrificing that engagement. The company has developed a platform that tells you what your team has accomplished, where they’re struggling, and what’s on their minds. Get the data delivered to you so you and your leadership team don’t have to go door-to-door or have time-sucking meetings to gain feedback.

"15Five is my favorite app because it develops deep relationships on our teams quickly and efficiently,” says Jason Calacanis, founder of ThisWeekIn TV Network. “I liked it so much I asked to invest... and they took my money."

4. Zirtual

Focus: Virtual assistance

Remember those things we talked about that felt like they were necessary tasks but still ate up extra time? Delegating is a beautiful thing. To avoid wasting more time posting job openings and interviewing candidates, just use Zirtual.

The company has a deep network of virtual assistants you can choose from based on your tasks, time requirements, and more. You can use them for temporary or long-term projects – whatever you need to free up more time in your day.

5. Snappa.io

Focus: Creating professional-looking visuals

When you need a quick-yet-stunning graphic or image for a blog post or your social channels, Snappa.io is a great choice. You can create a professional-looking design in minutes, even if you don’t have a flair for it. Snappa.io features a simple interface, customizable templates, and thousands of images, vectors, shapes, and fonts. Plus, you can connect your social media accounts and integrate with Buffer, so you can save time by scheduling images to post directly from the app.  

6. Quuu.co

Focus: Content curation

If content marketing is part of your audience engagement and you spend a lot of time curating social content, then Quuu is for you. After you set up an account, simply subscribe to a category that best fits your industry, or relevant interest categories that matter to your audience. Quuu will then hand-pick content that matches those interests and send it back to you. You will be able to share some of the web’s best content, and can trim hours from your weekly schedule when you don’t have to personally curate content for your audience.  

7. Contentmarketer.io

Focus: Influencer outreach

Influencer marketing is big right now, and when you can get an influencer to share or take note of your content, it can pay off big. But getting their attention requires a lot of manual notification and outreach – at least until now.

ContentMarketer.io offers two services that notify individuals by email (Connector) or via social (Notifier) when they’ve been mentioned within a piece of content you’ve produced. It’s all done automatically to save you that time on outreach and follow up.

"I got to beta test Connector, and it's the best tool I've found for promo outreach,” says Nat Eliason of SumoMe. “I was using Outreach.io before, or hacking together email scripts with Zapier, and this just makes it so much faster and easier."

8. Fantastical

Focus: Better scheduling

Having a calendar is a smart way to stay organized and reclaim more of your free time. Manually updating a calendar for every little change? Time waster. Fantastical gives you speedier control of your calendar no matter where you are.

Guy Kawasaki, former chief evangelist at Apple, describes Fantastical as an ideal way to keep track of his schedule.

9. inDinero

Focus: Simplifying finances

Keeping track of all the bills, taxes, and payroll details can be a big drain on your productivity. Working with many different service providers to get it all done is even worse. Enter inDinero. inDinero markets itself as “accounting-plus-service” and offers businesses an all-in-one solution for accounting, taxes, and payroll, on top of proprietary software. The company works with businesses with anywhere from one to two employees, to 100.

10. StayFocused

Focus: Boosting productivity

You wake up and set about getting tasks done for the day. Next thing you know, you’ve lost half your day to email responses, Facebook, checking RSS feeds, keeping tabs on industry news…

What you haven’t done is work.

StayFocused is a great extension for Chrome that helps you stay focused and improve productivity by restricting the time you spend on time-wasting websites. Once your allotted time has been used, the extension blocks your access for the remainder of the day. It’s highly configurable and lets you block entire sites, specific subdomains, paths, pages and even in-page content like videos, games, etc. It’s a fantastic tool to help you get work done so you’ve got more free time at the end of each day.

Know a great service or tool that helps you reclaim your productivity and free time? Share it in the comments below:

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