Productivity Tools For Freelancers
As badly as we might wish otherwise, there are only 24 hours in each day. If you combine that with the fact that you'll be asleep for a third of that time, getting the most out of your energy and efforts in the time you have is crucial. Increasing productivity is one of the best ways to improve your income and reduce the overall effort you have to put into your freelance business over time. Check out these awesome productivity tools below to level up.
17hats is a business management platform. It helps automate the entire business process for individual freelancers and small businesses by providing tools to manage operations such as scheduling, billing, and meetings.
1Password is a password managament software. It provides a place for you to store all of your passwords, software licenses, and other sensitive information in a virtual vault that is locked with a PBKDF2-guarded master password.
Airtable is an automation app, project management tool, database, and dynamic spreadsheet all in one. Because it's so powerful, it can be a little intimidating to start. That being said, once you've got it running you can automate and streamline many different parts of your freelancing business. They also offer inspiration for different use cases and templates to get you started.
Amelia is a WordPress appointment and event booking plugin. It helps you manage your appointments and events so you can focus on growing your business.
AND.CO is a suite of productivity tools specifically designed to help freelancers run their business. While AND.CO isn't full accounting software, you'll find typical accounting features like invoicing, expense tracking, time tracking, and project management. The purpose of AND.CO is to help independent contractors with business mangagement tasks so they can spend more time on what they do best.
Bitly is a URL shortening service and a link management platform. Bitly software allows you to shorten, create, and share trusted URLs for your freelance business.
Boomerang is an extension for Gmail that lets you postpone email sending, arranges email reminders, snoozes received messages, and tracks already sent emails.
Brain FM is a platform that plays music specifically designed for your brain to help you get into a state of sustained concentration more easily. Brain FM was built through the work of scientists and psychologists at real academic institutions to make sure that their process truly works. Freelancers can use this in the background while they work to get more out of each day.
Brand24 is a web and social media monitoring tool with powerful analytics. The purpose of media monitoring tools is to get instant access to mentions of your business across social, news, blogs, videos, and forums. For the freelancer, this is a great way to track and engage potential customers.
Buffer is a software application that lets you manage your social media accounts. You can schedule future posts to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Instagram Stories, Pinterest, and LinkedIn, as well as analyze your results and engage with your community. This productivity tool lets you spend more time growing your business and less time creating brand visibility on social media platforms.
Calendly is easy-to-use scheduling software that helps you save time, accelerate sales, and improve service quality. It eliminates the old-school way of using email and phone tags for scheduling appointments by using shared calendar functionality.
Cirrus Insight is a plugin for Gmail and Outlook. It's perfect for freelancers who want email tracking, email templates, drip campaigns, follow up reminders, meeting scheduling, and attachment tracking.
Focus booster is a simple but effective productivity tool centered around a pomodoro timer, task manager, and a productivity overview. You can set your focus time, take a break right when you need it, and get more done than you ever thought you would. Freelancing can be hectic, this will help you focus on what matters most.
FollowUp for email is a productivity suite that manages your conversations and tasks. Followup uses a tiered subscription plan, and their tools provide reliable peace of mind for the busy freelancer who worries about missed opportunities.
FUT is a free email follow up scheduling software that allows you to quickly and easily clear your inbox and set reminders for yourself. You can also schedule emails to reappear at certain times to make task management a breeze. Perfect for the productivity seeking freelancer.
Freedom is an incredible app that allows you to block websites, apps, or time on the internet altogether in order to enable you to be your most productive self. With the ability to schedule focus days or time periods you'll be getting more of your important freelance work done in no time.
G Suite is an integrated suite of productivity and collaboration tools developed by Google. GSuite provides a digital solution to a number of productivy challenges faced by companies of all sizes.
If This Then That (IFTTT) is a freeware web-based software platform that creates chains of simple conditional statements. IFTTT offers free applets for the beginner programmer and insight into making applets more powerful for the experienced engineer.
LastPass is a secure password manager that stores your usernames and passwords in one safe place called a vault. After you save a password to your vault, LastPass remembers it for you and logs you in when you need to access a website.
Mailtrack is software that lets you see if your recipient opened your email. Their sofware is similar to the checkmark that's used in mobile messaging. Extremely helpful for sales and marketing campaigns to be able to accurately determine what's working and what's not.
MindMeister allows freelancers to take notes and record their ideas in physical space. This allows you to mind map and draw connections between concepts simply and quickly. From there you can collaborate with others or share with clients for their input.
MixMax is a feature-rich email app that extends Gmail's functionality. Their tools provide enhanced productivity for client-facing freelancers.
Notion software provides an all-in-one workspace for your ideas. For the freelancer who wants to stay productive by writing, planning, and collaborating all using one interface, Notion is a great option.
Oh Don't Forget is a clever solution to a common problem: forgetfullness. With clients, invoices, project management, and tasks to juggle, life as a freelancer can quickly become overwhelming. ODF allows you to schedule text message reminders to yourself about anything you'd like so you never forget an important task again.
Pocket is the perfect tool for freelancers who inadvertantly discover information they want to save for later. The tool lets you easily save articles, videos, audio, and snippets of text from any publication, page, or app. You can customize your own space filled with everything you want to learn later for growing your freelance business.
RescueTime is a clever tool for freelancers who want to focus on important work without distractions. The tool lets you create and customize your own 'block list' so it knows when to intercept distracting websites, apps, social media alerts, slack messages, phone calls, and more.
SaneBox is email management software that integrates with IMAP and Exchange Web Services email accounts. The advantage for freelancers is that it saves you time sorting through emails because SaneBox does it for you.
Shift is not your normal productivity solution. The main strength of shift is that it removes certain distractions and friction points in your day to day workflow that you didn't even realize were there. It allows you to search all of your favorite apps from one dashboard, switch between apps without having a ton of browser tabs open, and utilize focus modes designed to keep your work effective. Free forever so perfect for freelancers and soloprenuers.
Shoeboxed is an accounting tool for small businesses. It's functionality is based on scanning your receipts, extracting key data, and then enabling you to create customized reports. This is a great tool for freelancers who want to glide through tax season without tearing their hair out.
Spin backup software is a data protection platform you can use to design, designed to monitor, secure, and back up your G Suite data. Spin software can be integrated with Slack messaging.
TextExpander is a productivity app that lets you use a keyboard shortcut or abbreviation automatically insert longer blocks of frequently used text called snippets. The TextExpander tool can be a time-saver for freelancers who consistently use snippets.
For remote freelancers who need to keep track of different time zones, There provides the perfect solution. You can add places, offices, countries, and people - and easily keep track of their local time.
Workflow lets you get more done by combining all of the steps that you normally initiate in separate apps into a single tap. For example, if part of your daily freelancing routine includes initiating a to-do list app, a playlist app, a news feed app, and a time tracker app, you can combine and customize all those separate steps into a single tap.
Zapier allows you to automate up to 100 tasks per month on their free forever plan. This tool is a gamechanger for freelancers who don't have the money to outsource tasks in their business or afford pricey software. You can automate anything from email newsletter creation, invoicing after contract signature, scheduling social media posts, and more.