Top 5 tools that help freelancers Track 🔭progress and stay accountable

Being a freelancer means, for the most part, dealing with new clients on a regular basis. The work may be unsteady, demanding, and come with its own set of ups and downs. Different clients have different ways of working, and expectations of how they’d like you to deliver on them. So wouldn’t it be really great to have a single tool that helps you deal with all of them in a uniform way?

A host of such project management and scheduling tools are available to freelancers, which enables them to lighten their loads by taking a major chunk of administrative work off their plates. This releases you, the freelancer, from the stress and anxiety that comes with keeping track of projects and adhering to deadlines.

Let’s talk about 5 such tools that will help you track progress, complete projects, and stay accountable:

Trello

This might not come as a surprise to many as its feature rich, and easy to use interface has garnered the likes of many big organizations. It isn’t just for freelancers, but for distributed teams, start-ups, and established organizations as well. Its Kanban style lists and cards give you a bird’s eye view of ongoing tasks and projects, along with whom the deliverables are assigned to. It’s intuitive design allows you to easily edit and move tasks from one card to another, or change people tags, as and when the need arises.

Trello is also great for companies who have partly outsourced, or outsourced all of the roles within a particular team to a freelancer, or external organization, and need a common project management tool that acts as an interface between them.

Todoist

Todoist is an extremely simplified project management app. It doubles up as a task manager and enables you to track ongoing tasks.

The simplicity of adding tasks: Unlike other apps, you don’t have to create a new task from scratch, then choose a date, and then choose a project inside which that task will fit into. All you have to do is add the task in plain text, along with the relevant project tags and you’re done.

A super neat and fast loading app that works perfectly fine even when you’re offline, it syncs up immediately the moment you are connected to the net. It has a couple of views such as the inbox view, the today view, and the ‘next 7 days’ view, and these accommodate for multiple working styles, and project types.

Additionally, you can also add your own labels to the views, and view them according to those labels, which is one of Todoist’s best features. This let’s you custom mark task statuses as per the projects they belong to. Under projects one can further create sub projects and sections, and this allows you to categorize details of one particular project into sections, instead of creating projects which, ideally, should have just been sections.

Listen to Jerad Hill speak about this particular feature here: https://youtu.be/UgLB3WhFjnM?t=614

Another lifesaver is the recurring tasks function, which automatically schedules tasks so you get reminders for repetitive tasks that need to be worked on, in a set frequency. It also helps you prioritize tasks, which are color coded, so you know which tasks you have to work on immediately the moment you open the dashboard. Rescheduling tasks is another feature that helps you reschedule multiple tasks with just two clicks, something that is not so easy and efficient in other project management apps.

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