5 Ways Technology Can Boost Your Freelance Career
Congratulations—you’re a freelancer! You’ve taken the plunge that thousands of people only dream of: you are your own boss, you set your own hours, and you decide what you make each week. You’re really living the dream.
But, as I’m sure you know, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. A career freelancing is still just that: a career. It requires careful and attentive management to keep momentum. As tempting at is, you likely won’t be successful enough to take on one client a year and spend the rest chilling on the high seas on your yacht.
Fortunately, technology can alleviate some of the more mundane, day-to-day realities that come with being a freelancer. That way, you can concentrate on what’s really important: producing stellar work for your clients.
Whether you are a freelance designer or a freelance copywriter, these technological marvels are universal in their appeal. There is an application out there for everyone that can make their lives easier and help carve out a clearer path to success. Here are 5 ways technology can be a boon to your freelance job.
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Better Manage Your Work/Life Balance
If your strategy for cultivating a freelance career is to take as many jobs as you can each day, you are going to burn out. That’s just a fact! What’s the point of spurning a traditional 9-to-5 job if you’re going to subject yourself to the same torture you would have experienced there?
Thankfully, there are applications designed to help manage both your workflow and your offtime. Cushion is one such app, but there are many to choose from. They can help you keep both a fiscal and time budget for your work and home, so that you’re not overestimating how much you need to take on to make a profit or just pay the bills.
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Save time
Depending on your line of work, you could be wasting a ton of time with outdated technology. Even industry standards eventually become passé and a waste of space. Perhaps large conglomerates can afford to stay behind the times, but, as a freelancer, you need to be two steps ahead of everyone else. There is so much competition that you cannot afford to sacrifice efficiency.
Are you staying on top of the trends in your industry? For example, if you’re a designer, you might reconsider what dxf file viewer you’re using. Is the interface streamlined? Are you wasting your time entering code when there are more progressive interfaces on the market?
This is a little more time intensive than other items on this list, but it is probably the most important. Do your homework, and be on the cutting edge.
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Help Schedule Client Meetings and Calls
Find it hard to tear yourself away from a solid workflow? You’re not alone. When inspiration strikes, it’s difficult to justify putting it on hold just to rehash a contract with a client. But it’s important to make time and space in your daily work hours to accommodate clients and businesses that contract you. After all, they’re paying their bills!
Plenty of applications and software deal with the mundanities of planning out client calls and web-meetings. You will never have to worry about overbooking again with one of the many tools on the market intended to help create a balanced workday.
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Stay on Track
As I’ve implied elsewhere on the list, time is a freelancer’s most valuable resource. There is no shortage of opportunities to waste it, and it is often difficult to parse what is worth spending it on. So you should take care to use it wisely.
What kind of workday do you envision for yourself in the long term? Are you the type that wants to stick to a rigid schedule, or are you more flexible? Either way, you should be keeping track of your work hours, so that you know what type of effort you’re putting in every week into the maintenance of your business. Fortunately, there are plenty of applications which will calculate this for you automatically and compile the information into a simple and digestible format for your consideration.
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Get Paid
Even if you love what you do, there is nothing quite like the thrill of receiving your first paycheck from independent work. And then the second paycheck…and the third…and the fourth…and…
Well, getting paid in general rules. But you should always prioritize spending less time formatting invoices and hounding clients for payment and more time honing your craft. Plenty of software is available for freelancers to keep track of outstanding payments and to automatically generate invoices without the headache that comes with manually typing them into a word processor.
