Productivity tools make sure that you can make the most of your time whilst working on your business.
As any freelancer can tell you, every second counts. When they’re not doing client work, freelancers are losing money.
With a boom in freelancing, it’s often reported that freelancers aren’t productive working from home. Though this study from the Stanford graduate school of business found that working from home improves performance by 13%.
How Do Productivity Tools Help You?
With productivity tools, you can simplify collaboration and communication between you and your clients.
On an average month, a freelancer will be juggling 4 – 5 clients a month. When you’re working with this amount of projects, you can easily become unable to manage the workload. This is especially true if you’re a new freelancer and it’s your first time managing multiple clients.
Unable to manage and you don’t hit the deadlines or deliver work that’s below expectations. Now you’re at risk of losing the client as they’re unhappy with your efforts. Leaving you at risk of getting a bad review and damaging your reputation.
Reputation is everything for a freelancer. Save your reputation by managing your workload with these tools. Ultimately productivity tools help you to manage your workload and get all of your clients work done on time.
5 Best Productivity Tools To Get More Done
EmailAnalytics
EmailAnalytics is a great tool for freelancers or small businesses that have a team. This is a productivity tool for teams, get customer service inquiries, and need to increase response time.
To use EmailAnalytics, signup with your Google email address, allow permissions, then setup your account.
Who It’s For
- Small businesses
- Agencies
- Freelancers with a team
Pros and Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Improve performance of your email campaigns | Your team needs to undergo training to use the tool |
| Track your open rates, click-through rates, and unsubscribes | Expensive in comparison to other platforms |
| Autoresponder reporting | Limited to Google Workspaces |
| Analysis on what content gets read and clicked | No third party integrations other than Google |
Pricing
14-day free trial then $15 a month.
Useful Resources
- 3 Secrets to More Clicks in Your Emails
- Cold Email Template To Grow Your Freelance Business
- 7 Secrets To Build An Email List Without Spending Money On Ads
Trello
Trello must be one of the productivity tools that I have used since when I started freelancing. This tool is a project management and collaboration tool helping me to organize big and small projects for clients.
Clients benefit from this productivity tool too because they can be granted access to your board. Seeing how far along the project is getting on.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Toggl
When you use this tool you get reports of time spent on a project. Furthermore, Toggl has an inbuilt invoicing feature. Giving clients that extra bit of confidence that they are paying you for the actual hours you’ve worked.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Evernote
Evernote is a note taking app. A great productivity tool for freelancers as you can take notes on your device and share them with your team instantly.
If you’re anything like me, you are coming up with great ideas when you don’t have a pen and paper to hand. For example, in the middle of the night, on a bus, or on a train. You get a genius idea and you don’t have a pen or paper to hand. But you’ve always got your smartphone nearby.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Proposify
As freelancers (especially when starting out) we are continually sending out new proposals. Proposify takes out the headache of creating new proposals.
You set up a template, send it, track it and have your proposal accepted with an e signature. There are many different templates for you to choose from and they cater to many different industries.
What I love about Proposify is that it can integrate with other apps, including CRM tools. As a freelancer you know that a CRM tool is important for you to track how well you are doing at closing a sale.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
In A Nutshell,
Using these 5 productivity tools you’ll save time, manage projects efficiently, and get happier clients. That was a mix of my top 5 productivity tools for freelancers. What is your favourite productivity tool?
Check out these 7 podcasts to listen to so you boost your productivity.
