Freelancer Talk: Productivity Tools
It's been about a month since my last post kicking off some freelancing discussion, I figured it would be a good time to do another if anyone is interested. Chosen topic today: productivity tools.
Let's just start by saying that there are a whole lot of them. Project management tools, accounting tools, time tracking, communication, storage and organization, all sorts of categories. I am pretty sure part of the reason so many of these web-based tools have popped up is simply because web developers are a pretty large contingent of the freelancing world these days, so they end up building tools for themselves and then spin up a product and start-up company out of it.
The first part of the questions I pose is simply: do you think we all spend too much time worrying about and investing ourselves in to productivity tools? Certainly there are some tools that require very minimal onboarding and are helpful at increasing your productive time, but it is also certain that is not the case for all of them. And determining which tools will be beneficial can be a time sink of its own; parsing through the long lists of options, reviewing features and walkthroughs, signing up for free trials (and then unsubscribing from all the marketing email lists), all of that is time spent not focused on your actual work.
I'll drop in a few of my own toolset to give you an idea where I'm coming from: Google Apps, Trello, Freshbooks, Slack. I honestly try to keep it pretty simple, though perhaps I overly rely on spreadsheets and text documents as a result. To be honest, I probably spend more time looking at API documentation for all of these kinds of tools than I look at it from a user perspective, because I end up with tons of clients who want integrations with all of these tools.
So what tools are the most important to you in getting things done and getting yourself back to the work at hand? Do you have any complaints on a particular product, or the overall ecosystem of productivity tools as a whole? Do you think we are too focused on such tools? Or not invested enough in them?
So I am not a freelancer, but I do work in operations for a company small enough that I am essentially in the position to use whatever tools i'd like. I don't think I spend too much time worrying about the tools themselves, though I spend a lot of time getting them all to work and work together well. Also the only difference with a freelancer is that I am not limited on cost, due to working for said company. I definitely spend a lot of time configuring and maintaining the tools I use, but I would say overall it helps my productivity and the productivity of my clients or fellow workers.
My go to's right now are:
Google Apps - For email, docs, etc. Normal business usage. No real complaints here, easy to setup and get going for a group.
Slack - For general discussions and posting status updates to the team. Also no complaints, once it is setup theres really nothing else to do.
Monday.com - For tracking of just about anything, goals, tasks, marketing plans, onboarding, leads, etc. It's the easiest and quickest software i've ever used and its highly customizable for what I need. Not a shill for it, but it's seriously a great product. Hugely increased my productivity on a daily basis and over the week/month at a glance.
Confluence - I just haven't found a better wiki solution for documentation, confluence is great for planning in detail your products or projects. It's a bit of a pain in the ass to setup and maintain though, just like most atlassian products. I'd say this one sometimes hurts my productivity but its worth it overall.
Hootsuite - For managing social media channels, though as a smaller business this is less needed and could be considered overkill. I think it's a great tool to promote and grow your social media if you can afford it. Track your competitors, dive into other topics to gain followers, etc.
Join.me - For general screen sharing and conferencing, this is just the fastest and easiest for me and my clients, but I am sure there are better options out there. Has scheduling integrated into google calendar which makes things easier for me.
Ringcentral.com - For my phone, text, VM and fax. Expensive, but you get quality professional phone services out of it. If you only need your own line, it's not terrible. No productivity loss here, VM to text is great as well and it integrates into many products. Has a very good phone app and desktop app for multiple OS.
I'd love to hear more about how you use monday.com. I glanced at their site (which could use a marketing overhaul, to be honest), and didn't get a great impression of what set them apart as a tool.
It is somewhat interesting to note how many of the tools you've focused on here are specific to communication platforms. I don't have any conclusions to draw from that, just a point of interest.
I run a small (two full time and three part time contract staff) bookkeeping & small business operations company. We don't use all that many tools, all things considered, and I'm reluctant to add more ongoing expenses unless they truly are going to pay for themselves. There are so many tools out there, and some services have given up on improving their own software, instead letting third party developers build toolsets on their system that then are an additional cost. After all, why pay for more development when you can just have your clients pay another cost to get the new features? Some of my clients are paying several hundred dollars a month for their software tools because each one does save money, but there's no integration. You have 8 tools each doing a single bit of it, but they never work well together.
For my company, we use 3 (4 is you consider GSuite and Google Voice separate), each covering a distinct part of the business, with no overlap.
GSuite & Google Voice (client contact): email, file management, calendars, video conferencing, free integrated voicemail, texts and voicemails get emailed to me, call forwarding to the office line and my cell phone. For $5 a user/month, Google is king of inexpensive good software.
Basecamp (project management): Task management and file management for our part time staff so that we can give access to client files only to people involved in that particular client's work. It's probably overkill for our size, but one of the easiest deaths of a small service-based business with a lot of moving parts is failing to track all the little jobs inherent in doing complex tasks for clients. It also contains a separate message board and chat room per client, but there's not enough action on a client-by-client basis to use it much. At $100/mo, this is the costly one for us, but I haven't found a cheap solution that integrates all of the project management as well.
QuickBooks Online (A/P & A/R): Time tracking, invoicing, bill tracking & payment. This is the major tool we use on our client's behalf, so we make sure to use it ourselves. Every freelancer needs to track their finances, and very quickly you're going to want a system that handles it for you as much as possible.
On the plus side, that has become a pretty lucrative niche for my services, so I shouldn't bash it too much. Keep letting other companies leave their integrations half finished, please!
What have been your general experiences with Basecamp? For my own uses it has always been overkill, especially at the price point. And when I work with larger teams they tend to be more invested in Jira, as it is a little more tuned to the needs of the software space. I also saw the Basecamp CEO speak at a conference recently, and was not a huge fan of his descriptions of their internal processes, which didn't exactly endear me towards a product that they built around that process.
In my experience it does some things I don't need yet, but the combination of file and task management that I can really easily set up on a client by client basis is invaluable. When I get a new client it's a matter of 30 seconds to use one of the project templates I set up to have all of the default tasks set up in a new project for that client, add the bookkeeper that will be doing the work and they're ready to go. From then on if I need something done or get new documents from the client I can drop them in there and there's no complexity about who can see or use that stuff. By comparison we used Asana before, and managing permissions for who could and could not access different parts was a lot more of a headache. Additionally, as we're growing we can make sure that all of the communications regarding a particular client are kept there in the client's project so we don't have to worry if communication happened in someone else's email.
(As I'm writing this out I'm having my self-image as a freelancer shaken a bit. Am I not a freelancer any more? When did that happen?)
There's another thing that makes sure I'm not going to move, and that's totally outside of the scope of the software; it's the only one where I've ever been able to get buy-in and something resembling regular use from my business partner and contractors. As costly as it is I dread switching to something new because it would mean getting buy-in and retraining, and that's a nightmare.