Freelance life is a messy whirlwind of commitments and projects to complete. Here are some tools available online that help to put some order, to organize work and time more efficiently Can’t stand the thought of clocking in? Does routine get you down? Does office life not suit you?
For one of these reasons, you have chosen to be a freelancer. Being independent is nice, but it also comes with many responsibilities, project management skills, and rigorous organization. The life of a freelancer is much more complex than it may appear. Your ex-colleagues will envy you; they will tell you that you lead a good life.
But once they leave the office, they no longer have to worry about anything. While you’ll be busy late into the night completing a job for a client, managing your accounts, quoting new jobs, and promoting your business 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. For some customers, it may be challenging to accept that a freelancer is taking a vacation or that he is not available to answer a call or an email at some time of the day or evening.
Fortunately, several tools can help you better manage your projects, organize the work of your collaborators, give the correct value to the time you dedicate to your customers, and keep your accounts in order. We’ve selected four of them, which, used in the right way, will help you make your freelancing life more productive and satisfying, from creating a project to issuing the invoice when the job is done.
Create And Manage Your Projects With Asana
Asana is a web and mobile application that allows you to create and manage ToDo lists, therefore a full-fledged project management software. Its structure has several levels:
- Organization ;
- teams ;
- Projects ;
- Tasks.
By signing up with your email, you will create an organization, and you will be able to gather colleagues and collaborators in a single working group. If you are involved in multiple projects involving multiple people, you can create infinite workgroups ( Teams ) that can contain up to 15 people each (in the free version).
You can assign one or more projects to each team, entrusting each member with one or more tasks ( Tasks ) with relative deadlines. Each task can then be divided into phases or by type, and with a simple click on a colleague’s icon, you can see his current workload and decide, for example, who to entrust with a new assignment.
Asana’s interface is very intuitive and includes two tabs in particular – MyTask and My Inbox – which will allow you to scroll through all the projects in progress in order of priority, deadline, or project and to read all notifications relating to updates or to comments about the tasks you are working on. With Asana, you can also share files, but if that’s not enough, you can easily synchronize the application with other storage software such as Dropbox or Google Drive.
Plan And Monitor Every Project With Instagantt
Instagantt is an extension for Asana, and as the name suggests, it is a tool based on the Gantt chart, i.e., the representation of a project’s time frame. It, therefore, allows you to schedule and monitor every single phase of your project to always have its progress under control.
The Instagantt extension will therefore be handy for keeping timing and deadlines under control and deciding if and where it will be necessary to allocate resources better to meet the delivery times requested by the customer or, at worst, renegotiate them by providing reports and data capable of justifying any slippage.
Value Your Time With Toggl
Time management is one of the most crucial aspects for a freelancer because, most of the time, the project cost is based on this factor. Estimating with the best possible approximation how long a job will take will help you ensure that delivery times are respected and quantify the cost.
Toggle is a very simple-to-use online timer that will show you how much time you have spent on each project you are busy on. The free version allows you to share a project with a team of 5 users and assign multiple tasks to an unlimited number of customers. You can view the following:
- the time spent on each project;
- the total time spent in a month in a month;
- the whole time spent in the last two months for each client;
- the time spent on a project in a date range.
You can download a detailed report at the end of the work. PDF or. CSV format.
Issue Estimates And Invoices And Control Costs With Invoices In The Cloud
Fatture in Cloud is an online invoicing software that allows you to issue estimates and invoices and monitor the progress of your business. Simple to use and accessible from any device capable of connecting to the web.
Fatture in Cloud also allows you to always keep an eye on all the income and expenses of your business and to stay connected with your accountant, who will be able to download documents from the comfort of your office. Accessing estimates, invoices, and costs on the move can be an excellent advantage for a freelancer or freelancer, especially if the activity leads him to be often on the move or with clients.
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