Best Productivity Tools For Freelancers
Managing your workload and keeping productivity up as a freelancer can be a real challenge. One of the most significant benefits of freelancing is being your own boss and setting your own schedule, but this can also be a real drawback if you struggle to manage your time and projects effectively.
In order to keep clients happy and meet necessary deadlines, you need to carefully allocate your time every day, which is often easier said than done.
If you’re one of the many freelancers struggling to juggle clients, proposals, projects and everything in between, then these productivity tools could be the answer you’ve been looking for.
In the freelancing world, the old saying of ‘time is money’ could not be more accurate. The majority of us are working on multiple jobs that are all paid by the project. This makes your hourly rate utterly dependent on how quickly you can complete a task. Toggl is a free to use piece of time tracking software and is excellent for keeping tabs on exactly how much time you’re spending on a job.
Toggl gives you a clear breakdown of projects, clients and assignments by the hour, so you can see where you’re earning money and where you are being held back. The handy little reminders and idle detection mean you won’t forget to use it, and it can work seamlessly across your devices.
The majority of project management tools are overly complex and confusing, making managing your workload far more difficult than it needs to be. Trello simplifies the project management process into easy to digest boards, cards and labels.
The tool is entirely free to use and allows you to manage the progress of your various projects, assign tasks to team members, and set deadlines with useful reminders. There are a variety of plugins available for Trello which can be used for more advanced functionality if you need it.
Freelancing life isn’t all fun, creative projects working alongside innovative and exciting clients. Every freelancer also has to handle the mundane tasks of running a business, and one of the most frustrating and tedious is creating client proposals. It is time-consuming with no guarantee of actually landing the job, and a lot of the time the same content is just being repurposed time and time again.
This is where Proposify can help. It is a proposal creation tool that allows you to create, save and modify proposals with minimal effort. You can choose the format and design of your fully customisable proposals to suit your business, and then send them directly to your clients. Proposify starts from $19 a month but offers a 14-day free trial to try before you buy.
