First, it was outsourcing. Now, freelancing is changing the work scene dramatically. The Internet and the growing presence of web-based apps, for both business and personal use, are playing a key role in the ongoing growth of the freelance economy.
It might not be easy, especially if you’re new to it, but freelancing gets much simpler when you have the right tools for the tasks at hand. Just as plumbers use specific tools to make their tough jobs easier, freelancers have their own set as well. Here are ten of those tools:
Your conference “rooms”
To host online meetings, WebEx Meeting Center is a software most big companies use. Slideshows can be presented and topics discussed, and people dial in to a conference to listen in. Product demos are also effectively conducted in this manner, even with participants scattered across the globe.
For those looking for a free alternative, Join.me is a good pick. It’s a light desktop application, and it offers the tools people generally use in online meetings – screen sharing, collaborative annotation, and meeting recap. For unlimited audio conferencing, Join.me’s Pro package starts at less than $13 per user per month, if billed annually.
Your personal assistants and secretaries
When your freelance business starts to take off, you will find yourself signing contracts and sending proposals to clients, left and right. Of course, there are those invoices to ensure you’re getting paid the right amount, and within the agreed time frame. If these potentially taxing admin tasks aren’t done right, you risk losing prospects and contracts, even delaying getting paid.
Motiv is a tool to automate dreary (but important) tasks such as creating invoices, contracts and proposals.
A free tool to set up meetings, Assistant.to functions as the reliable virtual assistant that continually monitors available times to set up meetings, remembers oft-used meeting times and locations so that scheduling is done fast next time, automatically detects and converts time zones to avoid confusion, and pushes email notifications to participants for scheduled or rescheduled events.
With a Gmail add-on that readily integrates with Google Calendar, meetings can be scheduled with just a few clicks through email, eliminating the need to visit a website or log in to an account.
The digital age hasn’t completely wiped out the paper from the realm of usefulness. But for those who want to reduce their carbon footprint and turn important documents into their digitized duplicates, TurboScan is the tool to turn your phone into a super portable scanner.
Trustpilot provides useful company reviews, which can come in handy when you need the services of another company. You definitely wouldn’t want to partner with an entity with dubious reputation. Trustpilot works very much like Yelp, and instead of just companies near you, it groups companies under various categories, which you can search through. These categories include Art, Clothes and Fashion, Cloud Computing, Computer and Accessories, Craftsman, Electronics, Entertainment, Food and Beverage, Transportation, and Travel and Vacation.
Continuous growth
Teach Yourself to Code contains links to resources, guides and tools to help you learn how to code. It has also done additional grunt work by grouping similar tools together according to programming language (JavaScript, HTML/CSS, Python, etc.), or platform (e.g., iOS). The site offers both free and paid courses.
Oozled is Teach Yourself to Code’s graphics design counterpart. It also groups resources into categories, such as photography, CSS, even JavaScript. With Oozled, you get pretty photos in neat little tiles that satisfy the critical eye of budding and professional designers.
Relaxation and productivity
It’s been said that ambient noises can help drive productivity and creativity. Coffitivity has been making some noise in this arena. Tools that don’t get as much appreciation, though deserving of much more love, are Noisli and Defonic.
Noisli lets you choose between productivity and relax modes. It changes its block color background randomly and lets you select the ambient sounds you’d like to listen to by clicking on the corresponding icons. Sound combination is allowed, so you’re free to mix and match to find the background noise that suits your situation best.
Defonic, on the other hand, lets you select between a plain yellow background, the light being “on,” or a nighttime view of the moon behind leaves on low-hanging tree branches, the light being “off.” It’s pretty similar to Noisli in that it allows you to select from a set of environment noises, and combine these to your pleasure.
And then, there’s Calm.com, which gives you not just the sounds, but the sights as well. You can select from a collection of HD videos that look good whatever the size of your browser or resolution of your screen. The videos are of the environments that produce the sounds. Calm.com’s minimalistic interface lets you set a timer, scroll randomly through the scenes (like shuffle play), and add or remove music, among others.
What other productivity tools do you have in your arsenal?