With the new year comes resolutions to grow your business and increase profits. One way to do both is to recruit more customers and to sell more goods and services. Another way is to boost productivity by following these tips.

• Write it down. List what you want to get done for the day or the week and then prioritize each item. Be specific and break larger tasks into smaller and more manageable chunks. You can use any calendar program for planning tasks. But if you want to try list-making software, Remember the Milk is web-based but has free apps for accessing it via smart phone. Wunderlist lets you share your lists with your co-workers, friends, and family.
• Track your time. If, at the end of the day, you don’t know where all the hours went, then you need to use a time-tracking application. With Toggl, you can specify a task, turn on a timer, and then turn off the timer. It has desktop and mobile device versions. If you’d rather have your activities recorded in the background, RescueTime automatically tracks how much time you are spending on particular applications or sites.
• Automate your activities. If you find yourself doing a lot of repetitive tasks, such as liking a particular article, emailing it to your customers, and putting a link to it on your Facebook page, then you can automate your activities using IFTTT (If This Than That). Every time something happens on your system then its related activities automatically happen. For example, you can use the app to specify that IF you load product pictures to Instagram THEN those pictures automatically get copied to your Dropbox folder.

The right software can make a big difference in squeezing more work out of your day without extra time. If you want more small business IT solutions, please contact us.