Freelancer tools are a great help if you want to advance your career. In case you are wondering, here are 19 tools that you should have.
Having the freedom to do your work whenever you want and wherever you like is indeed one of the best benefits in becoming a freelancer. However, it can also be a disadvantage. Distractions are inevitable. Since there are no supervisors around watching over, there’s a time (or day) we become inefficient or unproductive.
Productivity apps are great tools to use to be able to be organized and focused. It will help us be able to track on which tasks are we taking too long to finish and be able to act on it.
Using the right applications will help you be more efficient as a freelancer. Here are some apps to try to get you started:
Time Management & Productivity Freelancer Tools
Rescuetime
An application where you can set alerts to let you know how much time you spend on one activity. It also blocks websites that distract you in a certain amount of time so you can focus on your work. Moreover, you are free to log your highlights and accomplishments during the day.
Marinara Timer
Marinara Timer is a custom productivity timer offering you 3 different modes to choose from: The traditional Pomodoro timer, Custom timer, and the kitchen timer. The Pomodoro timer gives you 5 minutes break for every 25-minute work for the first 3 cycles and a 15-minute break on the fourth.
Harvest
Harvest is a time-tracking application best for freelancers who are billed from task completion and actual amount of time spent. In addition, it can be connected to multiple project management and finance tools which makes it easier to manage your invoices and reports. You’d be able to see how much a project costs you, be able to efficiently schedule new projects within your team, and check if all projects are right on track while keeping eye on everyone’s workload in a much-organized manner.
Focus
Specially made for Mac users, Focus is a website and application blocker for MacOS. It helps you create your ideal work environment through locking your fave yet distracting websites and applications like Facebook, Twitter, and Fortnite. It’s conveniently located on your menu bar so you can easily find your zen whenever you need to work.
Cold Turkey
A website and application blocker for those who want things intense, Cold Turkey makes sure you won’t be able to just exit their application when you feel like you want to ditch your work. They can not just lock your applications, they can also lock the whole internet and your computer itself. If you think this is too intense, no worries, you’d be able to choose a Pomodoro-timer and other features to help you enjoy the program more while working efficiently throughout the day.
Timeout
If there are people who get easily distracted by different social media sites and websites, there are also people who seem to work for too long in one sitting and forget to take breaks. Timeout reminds you to take regular breaks so you can stay healthy and be productive at the same time.
Text Expander
It is indeed convenient to just carry your phone and do some work while you are out in about. But a small keyboard can be frustrating to use, especially when typing long sentences. Text Expander helps iPhone and iPad users type more comfortably by expanding custom keyboard shortcuts into frequently used messages, addresses, and signatures.
Work-related Freelancer Tools
Divi 3.0
Working on multiple projects on web design would make you realize that almost every project does have similarities in different clients you encounter. Made for web-designers, Divi 3.0 makes it easier to finish web design tasks by giving you the capability to create, share, purchase, and download different pre-designed layouts across the Divi Library.
Qwilr
Qwilr quickly provides you intuitive and professional proposals, sales, and marketing documents. It just not help individuals gain confidence in pitching to potential clients, Qwilr also helps teams in providing consistent customer-facing documents and organization-wide documents. With just 3 easy steps, you can create, share, and have your document accepted all in one seamless flow.
Hemingway
A great tool for writers and editors, Hemingway app assists you by highlighting sentences that needed to be split or edited. Some of the legends are: yellow highlights for lengthy sentences and common grammatical errors, purple highlights for words that can be shortened, and green phrases indicates that it is in the passive voice.
Wave
Wave is an accounting app that helps you manage your finances with ease. This platform provides you the capability to send invoices, receipts, as well as estimates in just one app. Here, you’d be able to manage all your finances, helping you save time and even clutter from a lot of opened finance applications on your pc screen.
Data Storage, Security, and Backup
Duffel
Are you always anxious when it comes to losing your data? You have Duffel to depend on. By just connecting it to your Gmail account, it will download your emails into PDF files. This would be more efficient than having to manually download or save each of your emails.
LastPass
Handling multiple accounts and tools that require passwords can be confusing, especially when your client requires you to change your password every few months. LastPass helps you by providing you a ‘master key’ which enables you to access your password-protected apps and programs using just one secure LastPass password. It also helps in efficient online shopping as LastPass does the work of providing your payment and shipping details for you.
Project Management Freelancer Tools
Trello
Trello is one of the best apps to use for teams who like to have both collaboration and efficiency in one. It has boards, lists, and cards which adds flexibility on how you want to organize and manage your projects. In just one handy resource, you have all the collection of tools and boards to succeed.
Evernote
Evernote is an easy way to capture notes, projects, and to-do lists, making sure you won’t forget important details and ideas. You can choose to capture these ideas through the use of notes, voice records, as well as pictures. It’s an all in one app to create your notes, lists, and reminders even when offline.
MindMeister
Mind-mapping is one of the best techniques in enabling a team to create and share ideas for a project. MindMeister provides a web-based mind map editor for brainstorming and project planning, enabling teams to make plans even when they’re far apart. Any OS can use it – whether Windows or MAC. In addition, as it’s completely web-based, there are no more downloads to wait for!
Organizational Freelancer Tools
Dropbox
Dropbox is a data storage application that can be used in cloud and synced to your desktop or phone. Here, you are able to store all your files in one storage space and access it whenever and wherever you want. Moreover, it features easy and secure sharing to different people, and which stores it on their Dropbox as well, instead of having it cluttered in their emails.
TeuxDeux
A minimalist but visually pleasing to-do list, TeuxDeux makes sure you’d be able to add and check things off with ease. If you don’t finish the work you planned for the day, it would simply roll over to the next day automatically. You can also add recurring to-do’s so you don’t need to re-add it all the time.
RememberTheMilk
RememberTheMilk is awesome for anyone who has to find mentally taking note of their task stressful. It can be synced through all your devices and reminds you of to-dos anywhere. It even lets you share to-do lists and give tasks to others to get things done quickly and efficiently.
Takeaways
As a freelancer, time is money. It is important to be able to be efficient in how we manage our time so we can still do other tasks and still be able to rest, relax, as well as bond with friends and family.
Finding the right freelancer tools to aid you in being more productive and efficient will help you in the long run and make every second well-spent.
