Top 4 Essential Productivity Tools That Will Help You Work From Home
Since the covid-19 hit in late December 2019, it drove many brick and mortar companies online, as government restrictions and fear of the pandemic kept people indoors and significantly altered existing purchasing habits.
Particularly in Singapore, remote working has recently become the new normal. With these drastic changes to the working environment, with it getting harder to communicate between colleagues through work, many have experienced an inevitable dip in their work productivity. So how can you ensure that you, as a freelancer, are keeping up with your roles and responsibilities and staying productive when working remotely?
We have compiled 5 essential productivity tools to help you maintain your productivity and focus whilst freelancing from home. Excited to see your productivity skyrocket?
- Asana
Workplace in one place. Asana is a handy and user-friendly interactive task management tool that can help you with jotting down notes or reminding you about tasks due. Many freelancers in the roles of a virtual assistant, online customer service agents, or creatives are using it to plan their weeks ahead and set online meetings and Scrum meetings.
Employers can also use Asana to see how your freelancer is faring with their part-time duties. Asana’s platform encourages transparency and allows for open task reviews.
Other similar apps include Slack and Trello.
- Google Drive
Driving up your productivity. If you have just transitioned into a freelancer role, then there is a chance that the hiring company will need to onboard you with the happenings in the business. Sometimes, the hiring company themselves might not have a cloud-based repository to store their folders. We recommend using Google Drive as it is a near unhackable cloud-based service that allows both the freelancer and the management access to existing documents and the ability to create, edit, and share documents anytime and anywhere. Be it word docs, spreadsheets, Photoshop folders, Google Drive is a necessary tool that will both save the trees and also help keep your freelancing documents up to date.
- Discord
Once widely regarded as a gaming platform, Discord has now expanded its reach to encompass small-time businesses and medium-sized corporations alike. Discord is particularly useful as a communication platform for side hustles because it allows unlimited sharing of documents, graphics, and can also host video chats and voice calls online.
While Zoom Calls are corporate’s most widely used video conferencing app, it lacks the wide range of functionality Discord possesses.
Zoom
- Hosts up to 100 participants
- 40min limit on group meetings
- Allows for screen sharing
- Allows for video sharing
- Can record meetings
- Can’t send documents through Zoom
Discord
- Hosts up to 25 people
- No limit on group meetings
- Allows for screen sharing
- Allows for video sharing
- Can record meetings with third party software’
- Can send documents, embed images, etc, through Zoom
- Freedom
When freelancing remotely, it is easy to get distracted by every little thing happening in the house. Sometimes, you really need that few hours of undisturbed concentration time to work on your side hustle. Freedom provides that. It is an app that once installed, you can prompt to eliminate distractions and block websites, apps, or even the entire internet depending on what you need.
You can customize the blocks to only activate at certain times of the day, which stops you from accessing pre-selected websites like Instagram or Facebook during work hours. It also provides insight into your online behavior so you can identify the best times or the worst times for maintaining focus. It can be quite a handy tool for those who just can’t seem to concentrate on their part-time role.
Once you have mastered these essential tools, you are well and truly on your way to becoming the most desired freelancer out there. And if your productivity increases, so too will your efficiency and you will find your side hustle growing at an accelerated rate.
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