Being busy and productive are two different things entirely. Most people often equate being busy with being productive. Just because you are busy does not necessarily mean you are productive and this is one of the greatest challenges freelancers encounter day in day out, staying productive, and this is the reason why we would be bringing you the 5 productivity apps for freelancers to increase your productivity.

Time is never an easy thing to manage if we going to call a spade a spade.

Freelancers often worry about so many things at the same time -work performance, client satisfaction, time management, and keeping a good account of every transaction.

These things take time and are difficult to achieve which is why you need the best productivity apps for freelancers to ease your work.

Essential Read: 30 Best Online Freelancer Tools To Grow Fast in 2022

“You are not a machine, even if you claim to be one.” 

This is what I often tell myself as a freelance writer almost every day. It allows me to see the human aspect of myself, the part of not being perfect, and as a reminder that I can’t do everything all by myself.

I need help, and what easier way there is to get this help than to use the best productivity apps for freelancers.

We are in a jet age. You don’t need to spend more money to hire employees to handle almost everything for you when you can employ technology to do most of the work.

Why should you spend money when you harness these productivity apps for freelancers to ease your pain and save time and money? To cut the story short, I will be bringing you the 5 productivity apps for freelancers you can use to get more work done because, time, as they say, is money

5 Useful Productivity Apps For Freelancers

1. Wave Apps: Contracts & Accounting

This will definitely come first on my list of the 5 productivity apps for freelancers.

Keeping an accurate record of your day-to-day financial transactions is crucial to the success of every business, and a freelancer is not exempted either

Wave is a free suite of tools for freelancers who need accounting software that helps manage the day-to-day aspects of your business.

Designed specifically for freelancers, Wave provides an easy-to-use invoicing software, credit card processing for accepting client payments, payroll management, detailed reports, as well as the ability to add accounts and link up directly to your bank for quick payment transfers.

Their interface is super easy to use and most of all, the quick-response customer support really sets them apart from other contracts and accounting tools.

2. Qapital: Financial Management

Any businessman or a freelancer who doesn’t have the habit of saving is definitely heading for trouble.

You can’t grow as a freelancer if you can’t save some of the money you make. Qapital is one of 5 productivity apps for freelancers that can achieve that for you

Qapital is a banking app that turns everyday activities into opportunities to save, but what I really like about their service is that you can choose to set aside money for your annual or quarterly estimated taxes (or health insurance premiums) without needing to spend a lot of time or energy making it happen.

Their “Freelancer Rule” automatically transfers 30% (or another designated income percentage) from any check or payment that hits your account for over $100 to your FDIC-secured Qapital account to later be allocated toward taxes and/or health insurance premiums.

This essentially helps me treat my freelance business more like how my taxes and health insurance payments were automatically deducted from paychecks back when I had a full-time job.

Making a plan and actually sticking to it. Student loans and other expenses quickly add up, and there’s never a ‘right time to set aside a large sum of cash.

Many people, millennials included, commonly view savings as whatever is left over once the bills are paid, but that logic is flawed. If there is money in your account, chances are, you’re going to spend it in one swipe of your debit card, or in increments throughout the month.

3. Mural: Visual Collaboration

One of the most amazing productivity apps for freelancers you can come across.

One of the major challenges you can face as a freelancer is coming up with ideas that are destructive, destructive in the sense that they render all other previous ideas on a particular subject matter obsolete.

Mural is a really unique visual collaboration software, specifically designed for creatives. Once you’re inside of the app, they provide a flexible canvas to help you brainstorm ideas, a workshop on content, and integrate multimedia components so you can actually visualize where different assets will be placed within your content once you publish.

This is great because we work with a lot of teams that rely on blogging and long-form landing pages to convert readers into customers,

so it’s immensely helpful to have a very clear visual picture of how our final product will look before we publish.

4. Harvest: Time Management

I wouldn’t want to waste your time telling you how important it is you master time management. Humans can never be 100 percent efficient all the time.

Why not use Harvest, which is one of the 5 productivity apps for freelancers to compensate for this inefficiency

Harvest is a flexible, easy-to-use time management tool that compiles detailed reports so you can see the time distribution for your work, visually right in front of you.

As a freelancer, this has helped me realize just how much time gets spent on client projects each week.

Because we tend to bill our clients on a monthly retainer, it’s easy to lose track of the number of hours we actually spend writing and promoting content for each of my clients.

Best Project time tracking app for Freelancer

Sometimes we go way overboard with client work and neglect other aspects of the business, like bringing in new clients.

By logging into Harvest while we’re working and tracking exactly when we’re working on client projects, we are able to keep a closer tab on when it’s time to wrap up our projects for the week.

For freelancers who do bill clients on an hourly basis, Harvest is even more valuable because you can also create invoices that reflect the project hours you’re tracking, add in any additional expenses and deliver invoices instantly.

5. Dropbox: Cloud Storage

The ability to quickly locate a file from a folder is very essential to effective time management.

There is this saying that “when you are in need of something is when you mostly won’t find it or remember where you kept it.”  

Dropbox is one of the 5 productivity apps for freelancers to solve the problem of finding a lost treasure. You are not in El-dorado by the way.

Dropbox is a cloud-based file sharing service that allows you to save files (think: documents, spreadsheets, designs, photos, videos, and music) to the cloud and sync it with all of your devices at once.

Best Cloud Storage App For Freelancer

We choose to use Dropbox instead of Google Drive with my freelance clients to help keep things more segmented and to avoid accidentally sharing personal documents with clients.

When you sign up for Dropbox, you only get 2 GB of storage free compared to Google Drive’s 15 GB of free storage,

but the desktop app on Dropbox is a huge selling point for us because we prefer to do much of our creative work offline without a browser open, to eliminate distractions.  Like all cloud storage platforms, you still have access to files across multiple devices, which saves you from having to email documents back and forth.

To Get More Work Done;

Instead of staying busy, you should choose to stay productive as a freelancer.

And to stay productive means you need to have command over the modified factors of production -time, money, records, and ideas, and this you can achieve if you use the best 5 productivity apps for freelancers. Save yourself the stress of doing everything yourself when you can tap into a world of technology offered by the jet age.

I will have to remind you that our blog is a guaranteed place to visit to get updated with the latest tech and gaming news with ideas.

I hope to see you next time, but for now, I leave you with goodbye. Leave your comment on the best freelancer apps that you use and help our readers.