App Recommendations

7 Essential Apps and Tools for Freelancers

Streamline your daily routines with these resources

After reaching my first 6 months working freelance, I’ve managed to amass a few recommendations for apps that I haven’t seen on our sites.

These are apps I’ll use across my day to help streamline my daily activities, to save myself some valuable time or project some extra value across my day. I wanted to share them with you as I believe they’ve given me back a chunk of effort and energy back to my day.

Zapier is a “workflow” resource allowing you to connect up services to one another. The goal is “seamless automation” for all of your regular activities.

Your first mission with Zapier should be finding small tweaks to your system, when I started using Zapier I set up a simple workflow tweak which saved me stress and time. Every time I created a calendar event, Todoist would remind me to prepare for the meeting a few days before.

This would help me organise for the meeting. Don’t get scared of using this, give it a try for something simple!

Here’s a great guide to using Zapier to follow.

Download it here.

Reading the general news can sometimes be a huge time-waster.

About a year ago, I started reading niche news around my favourite topics like productivity apps, social media, influencer marketing, language learning, and email applications. Refined news has helped to give me more insights into my daily work.

Feedly is a great tool for tracking publication news and keyword alerts, it’s a power house to learning new things about a topic.

Set-up an account here.

Hours is a time tracking tool to help you keep track of how many hours you are doing for each client. Well-designed and very easy to follow.

There were many benefits to using a tool like this, I managed to work out how long I was spending on each client. This helps to work out whether I’m spending too much or too little time and help balance my efforts.

It has also helped to improve my task-based work, with a focus on refining what I do with that time.

Hours is free on iOS.

image credit: Fast Company

Found a great article! Don’t read it now. Save yourself some time, clip it to Instapaper. Instapaper is a really simple text-reader, it’s minimalist and perfect for those looking to extract the learnings, and not the ads.

Tools like Pocket and Instapaper have saved me valuable potential procrastination moments in the last 3/4 years, simply by deferring this to the apps it gave me time to continue working whilst capturing great reads for later. For those who get distracted by reads, along term lifesaver here!

Instapaper Premium is now free.

Tracking long term goals? Strides is a well-crafted habit tracker allowing me to log all of my statistical progress. It’ll help to log all your progress, whether it’s a practice you do (like meditation, running) or a routine at work, Strides will help your track it’s progress.

I’ve been really enjoying the easy design of Strides as well as the easy iPhone application they have to help me keep track of all of the areas I’m building habits in. You can use this for both your freelance work and also your personal habits/routines.

Download Strides here for free.

Many freelancers get stuck with their task management for the first year or so. I see this a lot when speaking to the YouTube comment or via email. This is understandable, tasks might not be their biggest priority, that’s fine. Try using Trello to kick your freelancing journey off. Use the board system to help complete tasks visually and organise your projects.

Trello now works offline which is a huge bonus for those on no 3G/4G contracts, speaking from past experiences this is a golden era for Trello.

Download Trello here.

This is more for your personal use. Gyroscope connected to services like HealthKit, Fitbit, Strava, Twitter, Instagram and RescueTime will help you to give you statistical data on your productivity.

Data will help feed your day and provide you with use insights into your routine, the RescueTime integration provides me with a “productivity score” to help determine my distraction to productive ratio. Very helpful!

Download Gyroscope’s chrome extension here.

Tips for balancing so many tools

Don’t try too many apps at once, as you can see here, most of these apps cover a specific area. Try to keep ruthless and review your apps and alternatives every 1–2 months to help avoid “tool obsession” something that plagues many new app/tool users.

I hope these helped your line-up for applications. Let me know if you have any recommendations for others in the comments, we’d love to hear!