5 Productivity Apps Freelancers need

Consider a farmer and a piece of land designated for some agricultural purpose. The overall objective of the farmer is to obtain maximum productivity (in terms of either food crop and/or livestock output), over a period of time, usually depicted as sowing/harvesting times.

For the farmer to achieve maximum output, s/he must work with the requisite tools. These tools include diggers, rakes, shovels et al, for farming on a small scale. For large farm holdings, the needed tools include tractors, large mowers, harvesters among others. There are also other important inputs like fertilizers and manure, that serve to boost production. Remember that not only do these tools have to function effectively, it is also important that the farmer in question has the skill set and conditioning to aggregate  and deploy these tools to meet his/her objectives for the farm

The preceding analogy holds true for the freelancer. Take yourself as the farmer (in this sense, you possess some soft skill that your freelance business builds on).  The online marketplace is your farm (in a related sense, you are working on the needs( piece of farmland) of your client(s). Your overall aim is to turn out output (articles, websites, graphic designs etc) that is qualitative, timely and relevant.

As a freelancer, whether you work full-time or part-time, this reality stares you in the face literally. On an average day, you will perform a myriad of activities including pitching new clients, working on proposals, performing the actual gig, handling taxes, balancing your income/expense accounts among others. Overall, you must also strive to keep your productivity at a maximum, so that your freelance career can support your living expenses as well as other contingencies.

The following productivity tools help you achieve these objectives. Seamlessly and without much stress. These tools take the burden out of spreading yourself too thin so that you can concentrate on your core strengths and meet deadlines/targets. These  productivity apps should feature at the top of your must-have list:

Google Drive
Google Drive features at the top of applications that give freelancers organization and control of their work and other related activities. Google Drive basically works to take the stress out of creating, editing and saving important documents and files. For starters, freelancers can keep create and store documents according to file types. The Google drive application also supports a broad range of files including Google docs, sheets, slides, Google maps, drawings, sites, and maps.as a freelancer, you do not have to bother about saving your work manually, as Google drives many functionalities, performs this task on automation.
 

What’s more, Google drive gives you access to a range of other Google apps, that can further enhance your productivity as a freelancer.at the click of a button, you can access apps such as Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Photos and Google maps among others.

With a free storage space of 15 GB, Google Drive allows you to keep all your important work and content in one, integrated workspace, hence enhancing your productivity as a freelancer.

Trello (Task Manager)
With freelancing comes the euphoria of having to answer to no one(with the exception of your clients)as to what time to resume work, what projects to handle, how much to charge per engagement and so on.

However, this freedom can suffer abuse, especially when distractions set in and divert your attention from the most important things needing action and attention.

In fact, even the internet, that oils the wheels of the career of the average freelancer, can also pose a stumbling block to achieving maximum productivity in the use of time.

So how can you maximise your time as a freelancer, in meeting schedules and deadlines? By turning to a task manager like Trello.

Trello is a tool that opens up a world of possibilities in getting things done and collaborating with a partner or group of persons.
On a personal level, you can list your tasks and organize them into boards. You can create different cards for each task and then drag them into boards, depending on the scale of completeness.

For team or group projects, Trello allows constructive engagement by the addition of comments, attachments as well as edits visible to every member of the team or group.

Grammarly
As a freelancer, one of your main tasks will be communicating with existing and prospective clients and customers. This communication cuts across media such as emails, online chats, proposals, questionnaires, surveys, pitches among others.

Because they say first impressions matter to large extents, and you can’t for sure know what your clients look out for in your bid or presentation, it is essential you put your best foot forward, grammar-wise.

Grammarly is a grammar-correcting tool that comes in handy in this regard. The application works to ensure that typographical errors, grammar errors, and missing punctuations are detected and corrected. You also enjoy the added benefit of receiving useful sentence structure/construction recommendations as well as plagiarism checks, if you sign up for a premium account.

DropBox
Has this ever happened to you or anyone you know? You have built up a formidable portfolio of your best works and you have them stored in your computer’s internal storage or on an external hard drive. But you wake up one sunny day to find that all of your life’s (at least your freelancing life) work has vanished! Either because your device was stolen or your hard drive crashed.

With DropBox, you can ensure this event never happens. Dropbox is a simple, reliable, full-featured file-syncing( on any number of devices)and storage service. One of its main attractions is that you can access your files and documents( including documents, spreadsheets, designs, photos, videos, and music)  from just about anywhere. The application installs seamlessly on a wide range of devices and works with multiple operating systems. DropBox is synonymous with cloud storage, and with 500 million users worldwide, you can’t go wrong using the app as a secure backup for your files and documents.

In playing around the cost of subscribing to the premium version, you could partner with one or more freelancers in obtaining a joint account. However, the free version gives you 2GB of storage space.

Harvest( Time-tracking app)
As a freelancer, there is the possibility that you would so love the freelance work you do, that you could lose track of time and allow other aspects of your business suffer.

Harvest is an application that keeps you grounded; timewise. In other words, Harvest allows you to generate detailed reports so you can see the time distribution for your projects, in real time.

With the ability to keep a track of time allocated to your freelance work for each client, you can allocate more resources and efforts in attending to other aspects of your business, like client prospecting.

Harvest also features added benefits such as creating and sending invoices online, integration with scores of other relevant apps as well as reproducible work time-sheets.

Conclusion
Staying productive as a freelance should form one of your core business objectives. The list above is by no means exhaustive, as there are many other applications that can enhance your productivity as a freelancer.

However, these apps are effective only if you are performing the appropriate tasks associated with your freelance business, to begin with.