For both online clients and freelancers, organizing and scheduling tasks is one of the top priorities. The habit of organizing tasks beforehand can increase your productivity, prevent missed deadlines and reduce stress. Even before the age of smartphones and PCs, people used “To-Do” lists to manage their everyday tasks. If you just dive into your work without organizing your tasks, you are bound to have a hard time. You need to know where to start, when to start and when to finish. Nowadays there are so many productivity apps on your PC as well as your Smartphone that make things easier, even letting you organize tasks on the go. Freelancers should make full use of these apps if they haven’t already. Organizing apps will help you prioritize work, categorize tasks, set daily goals, and send daily reminders so that you don’t miss a deadline. Here are some of the best software application tools that freelancers and clients can use to organize their daily tasks:

Must Have Organization and Task Management Apps for Online Freelancers and Clients

Asana

Asana is a popular task management app with an easy to use web interface. With this tool you can assign multiple projects to multiple team members, set deadlines for individual tasks, prioritize tasks, add subtasks within tasks, set recurring tasks, set email reminders, add comments, attach files etc. Set deadline for each task. Reminders. After completing your daily tasks, all you have to do is mark it complete and then it moves out of the way so that you can concentrate on the remaining task. The Asana app is also available for iOS and Android, and it has all the features of the desktop version.

Slack

Slack is a real time messaging app for desktop and mobile devices. The archiving and search function lets team members go back to important conversations when needed. You can use hashtags (#) to create project topics and then add members to discuss on the topic. You can also send direct messages one-to-one if you want to talk privately with a team member.  You can also drag and drop documents, images, videos and other files to share with anyone. With a fast interface, you can send immediate feedback or add comments for later. Whether it’s your PC or smartphone, you can access the conversation on any of your devices via Slack app. It can also be integrated with other apps to receive update, making it a single communication platform for multiple organizing tools like Asana, Toggl, Wunderlist and so on. Furthermore, the data transfer is also encrypted using 256-bit AES and TLS 1.2.

Wunderlist

I use this app to list down daily tasks and to set reminders for the main tasks of the day. Google Keep can also serve the same function but if you like beautiful app interfaces, WunderList is one of the best looking list/reminder apps available. Like Asana, this app lets you categorize tasks, add subtasks, organize to-do list, set due dates & reminders, add star to top priority tasks etc. You can also share the lists and tasks with your friends, family and colleagues.  Like me, you can use Wunderlist as your daily reminder app for personal list of grocery, household items, movies etc.

Google Keep

I use Google Keep for taking quick notes. For example- sometimes you may get a nice idea or an interesting quote in your mind. You want to quickly take note of this so that you can use it. Most apps are quite heavy and take some time to load or have a slightly complex user interface. However, with Keep you just have to press the + button and it adds a blank note instantly.  Keep also lets you categorize your notes, prepare checklists, set reminders and share notes with other readers via email address

Toggl

Many freelance websites have their own timer to track your work hours but I haven’t found one that is as smooth and reliable as Toggl.  For example- the Upwork Team app (previously “Elance tracker”) is good and reliable most of the times but it doesn’t work offline. On the other hand, you can keep working with Toggl even when you’re offline via its mobile app. The interface is also very simple and the functions are easy to learn. You can set up task names, add categories and also manually enter minutes/hours. Toggl also has a nice reporting features which lets you see the work done in the past week or current week. You can also check the report of your team members to see who is putting in more hours.

Pocket

Pocket is one of my favorite apps. I have installed it on my desktop browser, smartphone and tablet. Pocket saves the entire webpage so that it can be viewed offline. With its sync feature, you have access to the offline contents on any of your device. Saving the link via Pocket doesn’t require much work- on the browser you just need to install the Pocket plugin and then you can save link with a click of a button, and on mobile browsers just click share and select “Pocket” the webpage starts downloading..  Freelance writers can save articles, press release, interesting news stories etc, which they can review anytime they like. Thus, the app is very useful if you are researching a topic and want to gather and organize material from multiple online sources. Pocket also lets you add tags to categorize your contents and search topics by titles or keywords. 

Of course there are many other organizing and task & project management tools available, but here I am mentioning only the ones that I’m currently using. What are the tools that you use to manage your daily tasks? Please mention them in the comments.