Freelancers need to be resourceful. Your laptop is your office and you need to have proper “supplies” for it. In this post you will find top 7 software that will help you to boost your efficiency as a freelance worker.
I think most of you already have skype installed in your computer, but if you still haven’t you may want to do it right now. Many clients may want to take your interview in Skype (voice or text) and it is a must for long distance work relation. Skype not only connects you with the clients but also keeps all the chat records so that you can review them later. You can download the latest offline installer version for Skype from here. Its completely free.
Dropbox makes a freelancer’s life easier by offering free online storage. You can store backups of your work or share large files with your clients easily with it. You can access the files from anywhere in the word, simply by loggin in your dropbox account or by using the dropbox software installed in your laptop. Click here to download Dropbox.
Google drive (previously known as google docs) let’s you plan, collaborate, keep track of your work with your remote team. This is a great tool for remote work. You can download Google Drive’s desktop client from here.
Firefox is a free web browser and Firebug is an add on that saves a lot of time for the web developers. If you are a web designer or if you are planning to be one, this may be a great tool for you.
Jing is a very powerful but lightweight free tool that let’s you capture screenshot, take instant notes, highlight sections and share them automatically with your clients. This saves a lot of time when you are trying to show your client mock-ups/drafts of your work or when you are trying to clarify your idea/concept to the client. Download Jing from there website.
This is the best free email client that I have ever seen. You can easily set up all your email accounts in this little software and use all those emails from one platform. Suppose you have one yahoo, one gmail and one business email account. To see all the emails you will need to log into each website and check the mail. But with thunderbird you will have all your emails at one place. There are some other email clients as well, but I found that in most cases you will need to manually add email accounts with different ports, urls etc. But in thunderbird all you need to do is download the software and just type in your email id and password… the rest will be automatically done.
Even if you are not a graphic designer, you will still need an image editing software, and there is none better than Adobe Photoshop. But this is a bit expensive so some use other software like Gimp or even Microsoft Paint.
Do you use any other tools that you find extremely helpful in your career? Feel free to share with the readers.