If you’re a freelancer (or even thinking about becoming one), you’re probably aware that it’s a lot of work. The overachieving lifestyle comes with copious responsibilities, grinding administrative tasks, and lots of work — hopefully doing what you love.
Anyone who’s freelanced for more than five minutes knows they can use all the help they can get. The good news is, in the tech-friendly, 21st-century world that we share, there are plenty of freelancing tools available to help.
These equip you and give you the chance to establish a firm foundation so that you can focus on your actual freelancing work as much as possible.
Freelancing Tools to Help You Succeed
Here are a few of the top freelancing tools available.
1. Let Harlow Centralize Your Freelancing Life
Harlow is an online platform that helps freelancers organize work and manage their day-to-day operations. The platform serves as a central hub that brings all of your freelancing activities together in one, easy-to-access place.
Harlow helps with everything from client management to tracking proposals and contracts to invoicing and task management. It gives you a single view of all of your clients and enables you to stay streamlined and focused.
Harlow lives by a clear creed — and one that is desperately needed for most freelancers. In the brand’s own words, everything the Harlow team does is rooted in the fact that “We want to help freelancers organize their day-to-day lives and get paid, so they can focus less on operations and more on what they love to do.”
For the brilliant startup, everything is about boosting productivity and reducing the amount of “busy work” that tends to muck things up and reduce a freelancer’s quality of life.
2. Use Grammarly to Clean Up Your Writing
It doesn’t matter if you’re composing white papers for a tech blog or responding to a dog-walking client via chat. Every freelancer writes. It’s part of what it takes to create a successful business.
If your writing is littered with errors, though, it will hinder rather than help your reputation. After all, it’s challenging to feel confident hiring a contractor when every interaction requires looking past glaring spelling errors and misplaced punctuation.
That’s where Grammarly can be a lifesaver. The writing app is a powerful composition tool. The free version covers all of the basic spell-checking errors — but the paid version goes much further. It can also help with sentence structure, tone, and even checking for plagiarism.
The best part? You can install it on both desktops and mobile devices. This allows it to check everything from Google Docs to emails, text messages, and more.
3. Channel Elite Business Writing With Hemingway App
The other writing tool that we’ll include here is Hemingway App. The modern world struggles with writing in clean, consistent, and clear formats — something that the famous author Ernest Hemingway excelled at doing.
The tool named after the author’s laconic, “to the point” writing style is an excellent way to help those who ramble reign things in. Remember, when you’re contacting a client or emailing your bank, the person on the other end of the line doesn’t want to read a novel. Instead, they want quick messages with the correct details.
Hemingway App makes it possible to reduce your writing without losing the important stuff. You can copy and paste your text into the tool (or compose it right there), switch it to edit mode, and it will instantly analyze the writing. The results will highlight things like:
- Too-long sentences, which are hard to read.
- Passive voice, unnecessary in most cases, is a sign of weak writing.
- Adverbs, which tend to be massively, ridiculously, and excessively overused (see what we did there?)
Hemingway is a free online tool that you will want to bookmark.
4. Give Calendly Control Over Your Schedule
Freelancers live in a remote world. They’re used to responding to messages from a variety of clients for different needs at all hours of the day and night. One minute you might be texting a local client about feedback on a project. The next, you could be emailing another client in Australia about an overdue invoice.
With so much communication going on, you want to have an easy way to schedule meetings. Remember, meetings are already considered big-time wasters in many cases. Even when you have a must-meet occasion, though, the last thing you want to do is spend even more time going back and forth via email about when you can connect.
Calendly takes the headache out of the meeting issue. All that you have to do is set up an account and create the parameters for your meetings. When are you available? How long can you meet? Once the questions are answered, Calendly sets up a personalized calendar.
Share the link and let others book a pre-set time that also works for them. It’s as easy as that and necessary for anyone booking multiple meetings throughout the week.
5. Splash Up Your Presentation With Canva
Back in the day, a business needed a graphic artist to create something visually stunning. That artist often came with powerful illustration tools, like Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator.
Of course, you can still hire a professional artist if you need something unique. But that takes time — and a lot of money, too.
Instead, you can tap into the power of a tool like Canva to create your own images. It doesn’t matter if you’re making something important, like a logo for your brand or a quick social media post. Canva streamlines the process.
Canva also offers royalty-free images and templates that help direct the creative process. In addition, they can pre-size images for the platform they’re intended for and generally make illustrative art accessible for those without the budget for a full-time artist.
Freelancing is here to stay. Use these freelancing tools above to help you start out on the right foot. That way, when things get busy, you can stay focused on the work that attracted you to the freelancing lifestyle in the first place.
Here’s to a happy, flexible, and organized freelancing career.
Image Credit: Antoni Shkraba; Pexels; Thank you!
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