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?