5 Tools That Will Save You 5 Hours A Week

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FACT: Time is your most valuable non-renewable resource.

Everyday somebody tells me “I don’t have time to do that” or “How do you have time to do everything.”  I work a lot, but I also enjoy everything I do (for the most part).  The reality is you make time for what you think is important.  You might do this consciously or not.  In May of this year I realized I was very behind to getting to where I wanted to be professionally.  So I set a goal to wake-up at 5 a.m. every weekday in June.  You would be amazed at how much you can accomplish between 5 a.m. and 7 a.m. while not checking email and social media.

If you want a less draconian way of being productive, utilize smart tools to systematize and automate your business.

These 5 tools will save you five hours a week at a minimum!  That means an extra 260 hours in the year!!!!!

What would you do with an extra 260 hours!!!

1.) Unroll.me

My wife told me about this service and honestly if you only utilize one of these tools – choose this one!  It’s the biggest time-saver of them all.  I subscribe to a lot of emails and I love reading them but they can be distracting. Unroll.me has allowed me to create an actual system for going through all of the great emails I get. Every afternoon, Unroll.me sends me a digest of the emails I got in the form on 1 single email. That allows me to take 30 minutes to go through it all at once at a time that works for me.

2.) Buffer

Social media can be a huge time-suck for people and it’s easy to get lost in it. That’s why I knew I had to figure out a way to scale back the amount of time I spent on social media while still sharing great content. I had been using Hootsuite to schedule posts but it’s not the easiest way to schedule them so that didn’t stick. I came across Buffer and it has totally changed the way I use social media. It let’s me schedule posts to my Twitter account, Facebook page, Google+ profile and LinkedIn profile with the click of a button. 

3.) Google Calendar

My wife and I both own our own businesses and have several other things we are committed to.   Bottom-line: we live and die our scheduling by the google calendar.  If it’s not on the calendar, I didn’t tell my wife about it.  We don’t even talk about date nights now, we just send each other meeting requests via Google Calendar.

4.) SelfControl (Mac only) or 5.) Freedom

When you don’t have self control, these apps force you to. Both of these apps will block out distractions (like Facebook, email, whatever you choose) for a set amount of time and they will not allow you to access them until that time is up. No more getting sucked into Facebook or Twitter and wondering where all the time went!  Just don’t block BiggerPockets.com – that’s education!

5.) Asana

Asana  is a great tool that allows you to see everything that you need to do, are working on and have done already at a glance. It’s incredibly flexible and works like a digital whiteboard. Creating a project for each property you’re working on could be a great way to stay on track.

Summary

Do you have any other tools you recommend for saving time?  Let me know in the comments!!!!

Photo Credit: HVargas

Note By BiggerPockets: These are opinions written by the author and do not necessarily represent the opinions of BiggerPockets.