7 Tools Every Freelancer Should Know About
7 Tools that are Like Blessings for Freelancers: Freelancers play a critical role in strengthening economies across the globe. They work from different parts of the world and benefit people who need work done professionally. The global work environment is not the same anymore. There is more work freedom and capacity than ever before.
Being a freelancer is a fun way to make a living. You do not have to be bound and work from 9 to 5 like a traditional job. On the other hand, you can work from anywhere, anytime.
Having said that, a life of a freelancer could become messy if things do not get organized professionally. You are likely to get overwhelmed with the abundance of tasks. Under some specific situations, you might not be able to meet deadlines given by your clients.
To avoid all such anomalies, you have to use tools that can help make your work easy. Thanks to the latest technology. Thousands of tools are available that you can choose from and make your life simple.
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Chrometa
Chrometa is a blessing for freelancers as it helps them with their billing process. Chrometa is an automatic time-tracking tool that is designed to capture all the time that you spend on various computer activities.
It can track time on websites and applications, emails, phone calls, and meetings.
Chrometa helps you to record the time spent on carrying out various tasks like a meeting, a phone call, an application used, or a website visited.
It automatically captures the data and populates it in your timesheet so that you can bill it to your clients later.
No more guessing. To bill your client, you need to calculate the amount of time you spent working for them.
But if you do not record this information properly, there is no way for you to accurately state how much time was spent on their project.
Without any tracking software in place, the chances are that your invoices will be based on guesswork rather than hard data.
With Chrometa by your side, you don’t need to rely on guesswork anymore. It tracks all the information in real-time and provides accurate data at your fingertips.
This ensures that you get paid fairly and also helps
2. Mergepdf.io
Being a freelancer, it could be a little bit hard to manage more than a few PDF documents stored on your computer.
A busy schedule makes it difficult for remote workers to manage their files.
You get a lot of projects from different clients and keeping them all well-managed gets difficult when you are always on the go.
However, a free PDF combiner can save you a lot of time and effort. You can combine all relevant project files into one large document using Merge PDF online tool.
For instance, you got twelve PDF files from your client. They talk about website design, structure, on-page elements, marketing strategy, etc. opening each of these files individually to get the required information could be a tedious job.
Things can really come in handy if you combine them all using Merge PDF. This way, you will just need to open one file, and all the required information will be in front of your eyes.
No more hassle to open files one by one. This is how Merge PDF makes a freelancer’s life easy.
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Asana
As a freelancer, you have to manage multiple projects, each with different deadlines and priorities and usually with different clients. Managing all that can be overwhelming when you use basic tools like emails, to-do lists, sticky notes, etc.
You need to keep track of what you did, what still needs to be done, when you are going to do it, and how much time it will take. If you don’t do it efficiently, your income will suffer, and your clients will not be happy either. So it is crucial for your business to get organized.
How Asana can help
Asana is a complete project management tool that helps you to organize, track and manage your work. It makes working with your team a seamless experience. This tool is specially designed for freelancers and small teams to track their daily work and achieve their goals.
Asana comes with many useful features that can help you in multiple ways, from creating projects to managing them.
It provides you with the option of two plans: Free and Premium. The free plan gives you access to basic features of the app, whereas premium helps you get the full advantage of all its features.
Asana is a powerful tool for online project collaboration. It helps you organize your tasks and projects into boards and lists, assign team members to them, and follow their progress. In short, life made easier.
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Slack
Staying in touch with people is hard. The Internet makes it easy to keep tabs on your friends, but it’s still difficult to maintain a good flow of communication.
It’s not like when you worked in an office and could just turn around and have a conversation with someone.
So we are grateful for tools like Slack that make freelancer’s life easy by helping us communicate more effectively with our colleagues.
It’s great for casual conversations, but it also makes it easy for us to quickly get answers when we need them.
Freelancers can use Slack for managing project workflow, facilitating client communication, and coordinating with their colleagues or partners on projects.
Creating channels for each client or project
For freelancers, a good communications tool is a must-have. It keeps you connected with your clients and makes it easy for you to manage projects, get paid, and stay organized.
One of the best tools out there is Slack, a desktop and mobile app that serves as an integrated communications hub for businesses.
While it’s typically used by companies to communicate internally, there are plenty of reasons why freelancers might want to use it, too.
One of the biggest benefits of using Slack is the ability to create channels specific to a particular project or client.
This allows you to separate the various conversations you might be having about different projects instead of having one big chat room where everyone is talking about everything at once.
For example, if I were working on a project with a partner who was located across the country from me, we could create a channel for that project and invite both of us into it.
Slack benefits
Here are five ways Slack can make your freelance life easier:
- It makes communicating with clients simple and fast.
- It makes collaborating on projects a breeze.
- It keeps track of everything in one place.
- It lets you give clients access to project files.
- It helps you get paid faster.
There are many other positive sides of the tool that you can take advantage of as a freelancer.
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Boomerang
Whether you are a freelancer or have a small business, Boomerang can be a great tool for your business.
The email tool is an extension for Gmail and Outlook that lets you schedule an email to be sent later, set reminders for follow-ups, and get notified via email when someone opens your message.
Boomerang has been around since 2009, but it continues to add new features and updates to enhance the product. It also offers a free version and upgraded plans,
The email tool uses machine learning to help users manage their inboxes better by predicting when they should reply to certain emails, sort their messages into categories, remind them of important tasks, and schedule emails to go out at particular times.
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Canva
If you’ve ever had to create a graphic as part of a freelance project, you’ll know how many different tools and processes are involved. For example, finding the right font to correct the sizing can be a bit of a headache.
Canva has made that process much easier by offering an all-in-one solution for designers, whether they have years of experience or none at all.
Canva is a free online tool that lets you create everything from social media graphics to documents, presentations, and more. As a freelancer, it’s one of the most useful tools for doing your work quickly and easily.
There are plenty of design tools out there that look great but take hours – sometimes even days to learn. Canva is not one of those tools.
Instead, with intuitive menus and drag-and-drop functionality, it’s easy to get started with Canva straight away without any training or tutorials.
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Trello
Trello is a great tool for managing different projects. It allows you to create cards and lists that can be used for tracking progress, assigning tasks, and more.
Trello is a great tool for communicating and collaborating with others, even if they are not in your team. This makes it very useful for one-person groups like freelancers.
Trello is very popular among freelancers. It can help you manage your projects and stay organized and on top of everything.
You can use Trello to organize tasks, attach files, upload photos and organize anything else.
Prominent benefits of using Trello
Organize your workday: Trello acts as a hub for all of your freelance activities, so it’s easy to see what needs doing at a glance.
Track multiple projects: You can create a new board for each project or client. Cards within the board let you break down each project into different tasks.
You can use Trello’s labels to identify where each task sits in its lifecycle, from “ideas” to “waiting on client” to “completed.”
Manage your time: If you want to start tracking how long you spend on certain tasks, consider using the Chrome extension called TimeCamp (timecamp.com) with Trello. It lets you record how much time you spend on each card within the app.