Fortunately, there are tons of handy resources that will help you better organise your projects, automate commonly-repeated tasks more, and generally make better use of your time. Let’s look at five of the best tools for boosting your productivity:

Trello

Trello is a project management tool that tracks of the progress of the different parts that you’re working on. It provides a visual representation of a project, making it easy to quickly determine how far you along you are so you can better organise the remainder of the work to be done. You can create tasks, add deadlines (which can be synced with a calendar), attach necessary files, and more.

Chrometa

Yes, that's us :).

Chrometa allows you to ccuratelytrack how much time is being spent working on individual tasks and clients, no timers or stopwatches are required. It increases awareness of how you’re spending your time, which helps you to sharpen focus and boost productivity.

Being able to determine how much time is being spent on different tasks and projects will also help you to assess how profitable or cost-effective they are. With such information, you can make better strategic decisions: Such as whether it’s still worth providing particular products and services, or if any processes need to be streamlined.

It also means that you’re able to easily create invoices from the tracked time, for quick, automated billing.

Rate Calculator

If you’re struggling to determine exactly what rates to charge your clients, you can end up in constant back-and-forth conversations which take up your time and energy. You can risk undercharging for projects, which leads to less profits on your end, and potentially wasted hours of your day. The solution? Make sure your rate covers everything from the start.

This is one of the biggest challenges that freelancers face, but there is a simple solution – and it’s completely free! Check out the Virtual HQ Freelance Rate Calculator, which takes into account every single element of your freelance work, and does all of the difficult mathematics in order to give you a nice, simple hourly/daily rate to charge your clients.

Dropbox

Dropbox provides secure cloud storage, allowing you to effortlessly transfer files of all sizes and access them from anywhere, on a variety of different devices. Better still, you can configure folders on the devices you work on to automatically sync with cloud, whenever changes are made to them, for easy backups. It also provides version control, allowing you to roll back to a previous version of a file or folder, if someone makes a mistake.

Freedom

Freedom is an application that boosts focus and productivity by blocking websites and apps that commonly distract people while they’re working. Not only does spending time on social media reduce your productivity by directly taking you away from what you’re supposed to be doing but each distraction takes time to recover from. By restricting access to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc., across all platforms, you will be better able to maintain a stronger focus and complete higher quality work in less time. You can choose to block sites and apps entirely, grant access at specific times, or even go nuclear and completely restrict internet access.

This makes Freedom a particularly important productivity tool for freelancers who work alone and need to be self-accountable.

Learning to use these tools may be a little daunting at first, especially if you’re already busy. However, getting to grips with them, and discovering all the ways they can streamline your business processes is a worthwhile investment. The hours they’ll save you each day will soon stack up and, before you know it, your company’s productivity will have skyrocketed – strengthening your bottom line and position in the marketplace.