Freelancer’s best friends – Tools to make you faster and more efficient

Today, being a freelancer is a new labor choice. Freelancers have brought a new style and freedom to working hours, they have adapted their work to the lifestyle and changed the way we see employment. However, to be a freelancer is not as simple as it sounds. It means that you have to organize your schedule, manage your time yourselves, send your own invoices and have a structure in your day-to-day work. Ahead of you are chosen tools which are very helpful for freelancers.

 

 

It’s imperative to start with recommending a very handy and elegant Evernote – one app to save it all, offering storage for your notes, organized in notebooks, where you can also save photos, links and anything else you need for your project. You can share Evernote notebooks with other partners on the project, and you also get it synced for up to 3 devices for free, enabling you to create on the go.

The simplicity of using Evernote is now followed by Asana, a smooth project tracker where you can keep note of your tasks and check them done. Asana also lets you use it for the team, where you can assign tasks to each other. While using Asana, it is quite handy to have a separate app, that looks as elegant but doesn’t take up much memory, to keep your personal daily to-dos apart from the work ones. For this purpose, we’d recommend you take a look at Dreamie Planner app or it’s similar alternatives.

Another great platform worth mentioning is Trello, which is an online tool for collaboration between an unlimited number of coworkers. It is great for brainstorming sessions, offering you features like boards, lists, and cards, where you can also post pictures and links.

 

 

When it comes to time management, it seems like not many people have learned how to organize their hours, and this might be a side effect of studying in formal schools (just saying). But worry not, cos internet has provided us with various free tools we can use to organize our time. Starting with an app as simple as pomodoro technique based – Tomato Timer or Focus Booster or alternative apps in the store with an option to customize your pomodoros.

When speaking about time management, we cannot leave out Rescue Time, a software that keeps track on how much time in a day you are spending using different applications and websites. It will give you a whole new perspective on how you should reorganize your day and increase your productivity. Along with Rescue Time, we also recommend Toggl, another free time tracker. Toggle will help you arrange how much time you are spending on each project, and also add your hourly wages, so at the end of the day, you know how much you worked, and how much you made.

If you are looking for something new and experimental, you can also try Hubstaff for 14 days free trial. This software is partnered with Zoho invoice software, which is a very easy system to write invoices if you are a freelancer. It is also good to mention Harvest here, which is primarily a time tracker, but also has made it easy for you to synchronize and send invoices for your per hour payment by using this app. A winner when it comes to creative app names is certainly Pancake, another all-inclusive tool, whose invoices are using most standard payment gateways, such as PayPal. Pancake doesn’t charge you on a monthly base, they only have you paying a one-time fee when you begin to use it, for an unlimited access to its features.

 

 

When it comes to invoicing software, we can recommend Freshbooks, which enables you to create invoices very quickly, and you can try it for free for 30 days, so see for yourselves. Another app worth mentioning is Xero, which is also synced to PayPal, enabling your on-time payments.

Similar to Pancake, we shouldn’t forget to add Bonsai to this list. They also give you all kinds of management solutions, with the ability to accept payments from clients. They also have a free trial period available. Yet another cool alternative to this software is ClientSpot, where you can manage different clients and insert your deadlines.

On the side from PayPal, another extra safe way to process your payments would be Google Wallet, which also charges a very small fee, and it can be connected to all your Google accounts, which is quite handy.

These are some cool and practical software to help designers and other freelancers get well organized and be as practical as possible. There are many alternatives which are better suitable for a variety of personality types.

Which ones are your favorites? Are you using any of the programs we mentioned? Let us know in the comment section below.

 

About the author

Nina Petrov is an activist, poet, performer and mathematician. She communicates with the world mostly through words, movement and equations, but sometimes also by speaking very loudly. The only truth she could say about herself is that she keeps changing every day, never stops learning and interacting with her surroundings.

Author: ana