Time management matters. For content marketers as well as for anyone else. If you can’t manage your time effectively, then you can’t be effective in promoting your business, your book, or anything else you are promoting. It’s imperative to master time, to seize it, to control it–not manipulate it, but to own it and manage it well. Here are eight tools to help you do just that:

1. Remember the Milk – Let’s start with Remember the Milk. This free app is compatible with all of your devices, from your laptop and desktop computer to your smartphone and tablet. If you are a list maker, then this app will revolutionize the way you make to-do lists. Anything you want to remember, you set a date and time and the app will send you a reminder–to all of your devices. No matter which device you are on at the time the event sends a reminder, you’ll be notified.
2. Evernote – Evernote is your digital filing cabinet. You can capture ideas, thoughts, notes, anything at all with a simple click, voice command, or whatever. Record meetings, speeches, phone calls, and everything else. And the best part is, Evernote is completely compatible with Remember the Milk, so you can sync them and make them play together.
3. Toggl – How much time do you spend on your tasks? Do you even know? With Toggle, you can time your tasks and learn where you are spending your time. This is essential if you want to save time on the many tasks you accomplish as a content marketer.
4. FreshBooks – I love FreshBooks. As a small business owner, you can send invoices and manage your customers from this Web-based invoicing platform. But that’s not all. If you use PayPal, you’ll save a bundle on PayPal fees as you can have your customers pay through FreshBooks right into your PayPal account and it costs only 50 cents per transaction. Think about that! A $400 invoice paid through PayPal would cost you $12.00, but with FreshBooks, it’s only 50 cents. And, FreshBooks has a time tracking application, so you won’t need Toggl. You can also keep track of your expenses, so essentially, FreshBooks is QuickBooks for small businesses on a budget. And it will save you time on payroll, expense tracking, accounting, and time management itself.
5. Mindjet – I’ll be honest with you, I haven’t been able to make mindmapping work for me, but some content marketers swear by it. The most robust mindmapping tool I’ve seen is Mindjet. The idea is to brainstorm ideas and diagram those ideas using a visual tool that draws connections between those ideas. It’s pretty cool stuff. Many professionals use them to plan events, books, websites, businesses, meetings, and, yes, even content marketing campaigns. Mindjet isn’t free, however. If you just want to try mindmapping (because you aren’t committed to it yet), try FreeMind. It is free.
6. Trello – Trello is a great tool for teams. It allows you to create boards, which you can use to manage your projects. You can also assign teams to those boards and projects and allow each member of the team to update the project when they complete a task. You can use colors to indicate specific categories of boards and projects. This is a great project management tool that will save you time, whether you work alone or for a content agency.
7. Dropbox – Dropbox is an online document filing system that allows you to save anything — Word documents, PDFs, audio files, videos, books, or whatever is important to you. You can even download the software to make it easier and quicker to share documents to your account.
8. Milanote – Milanote is a unique tool that melds the clipping features of Evernote with the project management features of Trello. It’s flexible enough that users can make it work with their own creative project flow technique and includes support tools for mindmapping, storyboarding, brainstorming, moodboarding, and collaboration. They currently offer two plans: Free and Pro, which costs $12.50 if billed monthly or $9.99 if billed annually. This is a good tool for creatives and creative agencies.

If time management is important to you as a content marketer, whether you are a content company, marketing agency, a small business owner doing it herself, or an enterprise organization managing a complex campaign, try these time management tools to keep you on track so that you don’t waste time and money managing your tasks.

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