Boost Your Productivity: 8 Essential Tools for Efficient Time Management

Time management is a challenge for everyone in the travel industry, regardless of their role. Some technology tools can actually make it more difficult to work, given the distractions they bring. But the apps and services below can go a long way toward making your work life simpler and more efficient.

1. Rescue Time
Ever wonder how much time you actually spend on tasks during the day—and how long you spend watching cat videos on the web? Rescue Time will monitor what you do during the work day and present you with a report of your activity. 

You can break you work down by the hour, get daily goal notifications or receive a daily productivity score based on the factors most important to you.

The service also allows you to set goals throughout the day and helps track your progress. For instance, you can set aside focused work periods and if the program notices you’re getting distracted, it’ll remind you to go back to the taks at hand.

During focused work periods the service also blocks the websites that distract you.

Two plans are available, with pricing starting as low as $6.50 a month.

2. Freedom
Distractions can rob you of more than two hours of valuable worktime every day. Freedom blocks distracting apps and websites.

Choose which apps and websites to block or choose to block all websites except the ones you need for the current task(s) at hand. The progam even lets you cut yourself off from Internet entirely for a set period of time.

One of our favorite features is the program’s ability to pipe in ambient sounds or focus music to help with concentration.

Pricing starts at $8.99/month (or $3.33/month if you pay for a full year upfront). You can also choose to pay not much more for a lifetime of access.

3. Focus Booster
Focus Booster is essentially a timer that helps divide your day into shorter, more managable sessions devoted to specific tasks. Using the pomodoro technique (a productivity method that uses timed springs and frequent breaks), the service is available for free (up to 20 pomodoro sessions per month) or for $4.99/month (unlimited usage). The paid version also allows you to organize your pomodoro sessions, allowing you to track how much time you spend on a particular client or project. 

4. Momentum Daily
Another tool for maintaining your focus is the Momentum Daily Chrome extension, which lets you set one top priority for each day, along with a to-do list of secondary items. Every time you open a new tab in your Chrome browser, the program reminds you of the main task you’re supposed to be working on. 

For those who like daily inspiration, each day brings a new inspirational quote as well. 

Momentum Daily is free, but for $3.33 a month you can upgrade to the Plus version, which lets you integrate with other productivity programs such Asana, Basecamp, Google Tasks, Microsoft To Do, Todoist, and others. The Plus version also includes a pomodoro timer, soundscape choices for ambient music to help you focus, the ability to color code your to-do list and more. 

5. Forest
Forest is an alternative (free) pomodoro timer that comes with a twist — as you stay focused on the task at hand, you grow a digital tree. When you’re distracted and you leave your task unfinished in the time alloted, your tree dies. Each task is its own tree; the more tasks you assign yourself and focus on, the larger your forest gets. It’s a fun way to stay focused, but unfortunately is only available as a Chrome extension (or as an app for Apple and Android phones).

7. Toggl
Toggl offers two services (each priced separately): Toggl Track and Toggl Plan. With Toggl Track, agencies can use the system to track time and create timesheets. Users simply type what they’re doing and Toggl will keep track of their activity over time. A team function is built in so you can keep abreast of what your colleagues are working on without wasting time on an email. 

You can also use Toggl to create pomodoro-style work sessions with breaks built in. 

With Toggl Plan, a live team calendar lets you assign tasks on the fly and examine where your team members or independent contractors are on their respective tasks.

Pricing for Toggl Track ranges from free to use up to $18/month (or more for enterprise-level usage) depending on what functionalities you want included, while pricing for Toggl Plan is either $8 or $13.35/month. 

8. Boomerang
Sometimes you need to outsmart yourself to get things done. Boomerang, a free extension of Google’s Gmail, enables you to return an email to the top of your inbox whenever you want, so it appears as if you’ve never read it.

In addition to this kind of reminder, you can schedule an email to be sent at a later time—whether its to yourself or others. This comes in handy when you want a message to reach someone at a specific time. The service will even notify you if no one has responded to your email and you need to follow-up.

Pricing for four diffferent plans ranges from free (for 10 Boomerangs a month) up to $49.98/month (billed annually).