Originally published on August 17, 2020
This article will be interesting for IT directors, product managers, project managers, and anyone who wants to understand the processes of project quality assurance better.
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In my experience, the biggest challenge that freelancers face — more than winning clients or setting prices — is project management; take on too much work, and you’ll start missing deadlines, take on too little, and you’ll start missing your rent.
Some people are naturally organized; they rock up at their desk at 08:59, fully confident in what they will spend the next 8–12 hours working on. Let’s be kind and say that I am not one of them, and leave it at that. The only way I have managed to survive the industry is by self-consciously micro-managing my schedule on a daily basis.
When I worked in an agency, I knew what I would be working on days in advance. Now, I know 90% of what I’ll be working on, weeks in advance.
That level of organization requires very, very, very careful planning. I hold team meetings at the end of the day, yes, “team” meetings of one person. To do that I use a number of tools that suit me.
How to Choose a Project Management App
The most important aspect of any project is the end. That’s when the client will assess your work, and that’s when you get paid. So when you choose a project management solution, make sure it gives you a clear path to the project conclusion.
I know one freelancer who sets himself a hard stop at 7 pm every day. At 7 pm, he downs tools switches off, and walks away. I once heard him end a client call at 7 pm because he’d reached his cut-off point. It made me wince — I would have stayed on until the call concluded — but it hasn’t affected his business.
I know another successful freelancer who works on a budget. When she has earned the money she needs for that day, she stops. She bills by the hour to make this work, so when she sits down in the morning, she knows exactly what time she’ll finish.
Personally, I prefer a task-based approach. I know what I have to get done; if I can get ahead, then great, but my main focus is ensuring I don’t fall behind. I believe that if you hit your deadlines, everything else will take care of itself. Admittedly, there have been a few late-nights (and all-nights) over the years, but thankfully they’re less common these days.
No one style of project management suits everyone. And it doesn’t matter what approach you take, provided you take an approach.
8 Best Project Management Apps for Freelancers
As a freelancer, the most important thing characteristic you can have is reliability. Cultivate a reputation for delivering on your promises, and you’ll become invaluable to your clients. The best project management app is the one that helps you keep your promises.
There are some excellent tools on the market that facilitate project management, but most are aimed at SMEs, or project managers running a team of freelancers.
The tools here are listed from least, to most useful for the average freelancer. I’ve avoided too many time-tracking apps because I find these tend to encourage billing by the hour, which is potentially damaging to your business long term. If you do need pure time-tracking, check out Harvest. I’ve also avoided solutions that are too large-scale to benefit freelancers. If you’re looking for a project management tool for teams, then Basecamp, Jira, Project.co, and Redbooth are all worth considering.
Sadly none of these apps are perfect, and there’s a good chance you’ll need to use two or three to manage your projects.
8. Todoist
Todoist is hands down the best to-do app on the market. The downside is that its feature set is minimal.
Todoist really excels at lists. You can break down tasks into sub-tasks, and sub-sub-tasks. The downside is there’s no real scheduling or comparison of multiple projects in a single view.
The mobile apps are great, and Todoist recently introduced boards, a form of kanban board that gives you a good overview of everything. If it introduces a gantt chart, I can see myself relying on it more.
Todoist has a free forever plan that is fine for most freelancers, and the paid plans start at just $3 per month.
7. Bonsai
Bonsai is an excellent service for freelancers that grew from a simple invoicing app to include proposals, contracts, time-tracking, and more.
I used Bonsai for invoicing for a couple of years, and it does everything it claims to do. However, there are a couple of significant areas where it falls down. Firstly, its invoicing is super-aggressive and cannot be customized — make sure you’re on friendly terms with any client you send a Bonsai invoice to. Secondly, while it does a good job of tracking what you have done, it doesn’t help you plan what needs to be done beyond a formal proposal.
If you’re running a few simple projects, then it’s possible Bonsai is right for you. Pricing starts at $19 per month.
6. Monday
Monday is one of the biggest players in the project management market. It offers a dizzying array of options, and if this list were aimed at project management for agencies, Monday would be further along our countdown. Monday may suit freelancers, particularly those who have migrated from agency work, but for most, it’s more than we need.
There is a free-forever plan that covers almost everything you could want. However, if you need to view your projects as a gantt chart — and I strongly suggest you do — then you’ll need to update to the standard plan, which starts at $8 per user per month, with a minimum of three seats, meaning at least $24 per month when billed annually.
5. AND.CO
AND.CO stands out as a slick, easy-to-use option for managing a freelance business. Like Bonsai, it allows you to manage proposals, invoicing, time-tracking, expenses, and more.
AND.CO also has extremely well-liked customer support. An underestimated consideration when you don’t have your own accounts team to resolve problems.
As with other solutions of this type, the task-management is lacking. It does include a simple to-do list, but in my opinion, it’s not sufficient, and you’ll need to supplement it with something that supports gantt charts.
There’s a free forever plan, but it’s barely more than a free trial. Pricing for full-featured access starts at $18 per month when billed annually.
4. ClickUp
ClickUp is a SaaS that aims to replace just about everything else you could need. Unlike some options on this list, it includes a CRM, which is a bonus because there’s nothing worse than relying on the search function in your email to track down someone’s contact details.
ClickUp also offers a genuinely free-forever account with enough features to make it usable. If you choose to upgrade to a paid plan, it’s just $5 per user per month, which is excellent value.
If anything, there’s just too much in here. If you’re someone who considers themselves a power-user who enjoys digging into every nuance of a UI, then ClickUp could be for you. But, if, like me, you favor a simple tool that does what it’s told and gets out of the way, then there are better options.
3. Asana
Asana is probably the best-known project management tool on the market. It offers a tremendous number of options and is flexible enough for any style of project management.
There’s a free forever plan that is ideal for getting started and offers you most — you may be sensing a theme here — of the features you’ll need. But Asana’s best feature is its excellent timeline implementation of the gantt chart, for which you’ll need to upgrade to a premium plan costing $10.99 per user per month, with a minimum number of 2 seats that translates to a rather expensive $21.98 per month.
2. Trello
Trello is famous for its kanban boards, and many people prefer them to gantt charts, which has helped the app grow rapidly in the last few years.
If you’re prepared to pay $10 per user per month, Trello actually offers gantt charts as well, in the form of its timeline feature.
Trello is mainly designed for teams, not freelancers. However, if you do have the budget for a premium plan, Trello gives you an enviable ability to switch project management styles on a whim.
1. Toggl
Toggl is perhaps the perfect balance of time-tracking and gantt chart that is ideal for freelance projects.
As with most tools, Toggl is designed for teams, with billing starting at $8 per user per month. However, it offers a solo plan, designed for freelancers, that is free forever.
The main thing you miss out on with Toggl’s Solo plan is team timelines, which you won’t need unless you’re outsourcing work. One other obvious omission is unlimited planning boards, which you may find yourself paying for sooner or later.
But for a mixture of simplicity and powerful features available for $0, Toggl is hard to beat.
Featured image via Pexels
The post 8 Freelance Project Management Apps for 2021+ first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
Productivity is a crowded space, with countless apps and services promising to make your life and business easier and more profitable. Of all the apps that make that promise, very few deliver, but we’ve found one that does: Taskade.
Flexible Planning With Taskade
Every problem is unique, and part of what defines us as creative professionals is the different ways we approach problems. What suits one person in one situation doesn’t suit another in another. This is where many planning apps fall down: they adopt one singular approach and expect users to fit around the app.
Taskade is different. Like the love-child of Trello, Notion, and Slack, Taskade uses a template approach to create a flexible planning system that you can use in whatever way you prefer.
When you open up Taskade, you’ll see some quick options: ‘blank,’ ‘weekly planner,’ ‘meeting agenda,’ and so forth. But there’s also a ‘more’ option that will give you access to the hundreds of templates Taskade supplies. There are dozens of template categories, and each category contains multiple templates that you can use to drive your planning process.
Whether you’re looking for a task list for launching on Product Hunt, a design system checklist, or a project scrum board, you’ll find the template ready and waiting for you.
If none of the predesigned options are right for the task at hand, Taskade gives you the option to create your own template from the basic building blocks of boards, actions, mind maps, charts, and lists.
Team Collaboration With Taskade
One of Taskade’s main strengths is its ability to work equally well for individuals and teams.
It makes sense when you’re evaluating a product that you do it on your own. But we encourage you to bring team members on board early in the trial because it’s when working with teams that Taskade really excels as a collaborative tool.
Once you’ve created a new planning project, you can invite your team, either by email or — if they’re already registered — by tagging them with their Taskade username.
You can assign tasks to individuals or multiple individuals (a much better option than the free-for-all you find in some to-do apps). You can also set deadlines for tasks so that everyone knows what the schedule is.
Team Chat on Taskade
Another area that Taskade excels for teams is the built-in real-time live chat. You can communicate with team members right in the project instead of jumping onto Slack or email.
For teams working remotely, or even just multi-tasking throughout the day, it’s a great way of ensuring that everyone has the information they need. As a result, mistakes are minimized, and best of all, there’s a written record that can be referred back to at any time.
Chat can be sent to the whole team, or direct messaged to an individual, so you don’t need to worry about filling up everyone’s notifications with messages that don’t apply to them.
Project Management With Taskade
If you’re working on a single project, then you probably know exactly where it is at all times. But for anyone working on multiple projects, it can be hard to keep track of everything. So Taskade has several different options for project managers.
The Mindmap section is one of the most useful parts of Taskade because it gives you a complete overview of everything in your project. You can see what has been completed and how much time it took — that way, you can assess how viable the timeline for your other tasks is.
Another great feature of Taskade is the activity feed. When one of your team makes a change to a project, it will pop up in your activity feed, and the next time you log in, you’ll see the status of your projects with a single glance.
Multi-Platform
One of our favorite aspects of Taskade is that it works equally well across different platforms. As well as the desktop web app, you’ll also find native apps in the iOS app store and the Android play store.
Syncing your account over different apps is awesome because ideas often occur at inconvenient times — on your commute, walking the dog. Even when you’re at your desk, it’s much handier to grab your phone and make notes than it is to switch to your browser and visit a site.
Easy Registration
If you’re feeling the pressure of a bulging inbox, or to-do lists on multiple post-its, then the last thing you need is another complex, confusing task to add to the pile.
Taskade is super-easy to get started with. Just click the ‘Sign up’ link in the top right of the site, and you’ll have three options: Sign up with Google, sign up with your email, or you can continue as a guest.
If you’re not sold yet, then continue as a guest — essentially a free trial — you can sign in properly later once your curiosity is satisfied.
Free to Use
Taskade is free to use on a limited basis. The free plan comes with 500Mb of storage and a maximum 25Mb file size. You can create individual tasks or whole projects, workflows, and custom templates and share tasks and projects with your team. That’s enough to help you make the most of Taskade for $0.
If you find that the generous free plan isn’t quite enough, paid plans start at just $5 per month. The paid plan gives you unlimited storage and bumps the maximum file size up to 250Mb. You have the same core features as the free plan; it’s just that they’re unlimited, which means you can do even more planning. In addition, the paid plan adds some handy extra features that are great time-savers, such as sorting tasks, creating repeat tasks, and bulk assigning tasks. Just look at how Taskade compares to similar tools.
Most professionals will get along with the free plan just fine, but $5 per month for unlimited storage is a great deal. On top of that, you have future premium features to look forward to, including a project revision history and a calendar view.
You can sign up to Taskade for free now, as a guest, with your email, or with Google.
[– This is a sponsored post on behalf of Taskade –]
The post Collaborative Task Management with Taskade first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
When you think of installing analytics, you probably reach for Google Analytics. And you wouldn’t be alone. The platform’s tight integration with SEO and the implication that using Google products is beneficial to ranking means that Google Analytics is the most commonly installed analytics solution globally.
Google Analytics isn’t a bad choice: it’s free, it’s fairly comprehensive, and it does indeed tie most SEO efforts up with a nice bow.
But Google Analytics is also slow, extremely bad for privacy — both yours and your users’ — and for many people, it’s too unwieldy, having grown organically over the years into a relatively complex UI.
Some alternatives are fast, privacy-friendly, and geared towards different specialisms. Today we’re rounding up the best…
1. Heap
Heap is an event-based analytics platform. That means you can tell not just how many people visited your site but what actions they took when they were there. This isn’t a unique proposition, but Heap is one of the best implementations.
Heap offers an auto-track tool, which is ideal for new installations because you can get up and running immediately and fine-tune the details later. That makes it great for startups, although it’s also the choice of major corporations like Microsoft.
Heap’s free plan includes 60k sessions per year and 12 months of data history, but when you outgrow that, the business plans start at $12,000/year.
2 ChartMogul
ChartMogul is geared towards SaaS that offer subscription plans, staking a claim as the world’s first subscription data platform.
Services like Buffer and Webflow use ChartMogul to monitor their revenue and analyze the ROI of changes to their features, design, and user experience.
Ideally suited for startups, ChartMogul pricing is based on monthly recurring revenue; it has a free plan for up to $10,000 MMR; after that, pricing starts at $100/month.
3. Fathom
Fathom is an awesome, privacy-first analytics solution. It offers a simple dashboard and is ideal for anyone looking for simple analytics information to verify business decisions.
Fathom is ideally suited to freelancers, or entrepreneurs with multiple projects, as it allows you to run multiple domains from a single account. Fathom is entirely cookieless, meaning you can ditch that annoying cookie notice. It’s GDPR, ePrivacy, PECR, CCPA, and COPPA compliant.
There’s a seven-day free trial; after that, Fathom starts at $14/month.
4. FullStory
FullStory is designed to help you develop engaging online products with an emphasis on user experience.
FullStory is a set of tools, making it ideal for large in-house teams or in-house teams working with outside agencies or freelancers. It pitches itself as a single source of truth from which everyone from the marketing department to the database engineers can draw their insights, helping digital teams rapidly iterate by keeping everyone in the same loop.
FullStory uses AI to track and interpret unexpected events, from rage clicks to traffic spikes, and breaks those events down to a dollar-cost, so you can instantly see where your interventions will have the most impact.
There’s a free plan for up to 1k sessions per month; once you outgrow that, you need to talk to the sales team for a quote.
5. Amplitude
Amplitude has one of the most user-friendly dashboards on this list, with tons of power behind it. For project managers trying to make science-based decisions about future development, it’s a godsend.
The downside with Amplitude is that to make the most of its powerful data connections, you need to pump a lot of data in. For that reason, Amplitude is best suited to sites that already have a substantial volume of traffic — among those customers are Cisco and PayPal.
Amplitude provides a free plan, with its core analytics and up to 10m tracked actions per month. For premium plans, you have to contact their sales team for a quote.
6. Mixpanel
Mixpanel is a little bit more than an analytics program, aiming to be a whole suite of web tools it has ventured into split testing and notifications.
Mixpanel is laser-focused on maximizing your sales funnel. One look at the dashboard, and you can see that Mixpanel, while very well designed, has too many features to present them simply; Mixpanel is ideally suited to agencies and in-house development teams with time to invest — you probably want to keep the CEO away from this one.
Mixpanel has a generous free plan for up to 100k monthly users, with its business plans starting at $25/month.
7. Mode
Mode is a serious enterprise-level solution for product intelligence and decision making.
Ideally suited to in-house teams, Mode allows you to monitor financial flow and output the results in investor-friendly reports. You can monitor your entire tech stack and, of course, understand how users are interacting with your product. Wondering who handles the analytics for Shopify? That would be Mode.
Mode has a free plan aimed at individuals, but this tool’s scope is really beyond freelancers, and the free plan’s only likely to appeal to high-price consultants and tech trouble-shooters. For the full business plan, you need to contact Mode’s sales team for a quote.
8. Microanalytics
Microanalytics is a relatively new analytics program with a lightweight, privacy-focused approach.
Microanalytics provides a simple dashboard with acquisitions, user location, technology, and the all-important event tracking to monitor user behavior. Microanalytics is compliant with the web’s most stringent privacy laws, including GDPR, PECR, and CCPA. The tracking code is just 1kb in size, meaning that you’ll hardly notice its footprint in your stats.
Microanalytics is free for up to 10k pageviews/month; after that, the monthly plan starts at $9.
9. GoSquared
GoSquared is another suite of tools, this time aimed at SaaS. Its primary product is its analytics, but it also includes live chat, marketing tools, and a team inbox.
If you’re tired of comparing multiple tools to help make the most of your startup, GoSquared kills several birds with one stone. Perhaps most importantly, if you’re beginning to build a team and don’t have any engineers onboard yet, GoSquared has an award-winning support team and an idiot-proof setup process.
GoSquared has a free plan that’s fine for evaluating the suite and integrating data from day one. As you begin to grow, paid plans start at $40/month.
10. Segment
Segment is a little different from the other analytics tools on this list; Segment is a layer that sits between your site and your analytics. It integrates with many of the tools on this list.
There are several benefits to this approach. The main one is that different teams within your enterprise can access analytics data in a form that suits them — designers can access complex data, and management can stick to revenue flow. It also means that you can switch analytics programs with a single setting in Segment and even migrate historical data into new apps. If you’re an enterprise that wants to future-proof its customer intelligence gathering, Segment is worth considering.
Segment is trusted by some of the web’s best-known names, from IBM to Levis, and…ahem…Google.
Segment is free for up to 1k visitors per month, and after that, the team plan starts at $120/month.
The post 10 Best Alternatives to Google Analytics in 2021 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
As a project manager, credible sources of information hold significant value in terms of knowledge acquisition. Aside from all the books and certifications, social media platforms are equally beneficial. One such platform to gain fantastic insights is Twitter. We’ve hunted down some of the top project managers that you need to follow on Twitter.
We’re all well aware of Twitter as a popular medium of gaining and sharing information. As we’re speaking, there are around 335 million active users utilizing the platform for exchanging information according to their interests.
There are so many different roles in the project development, and it is so easy to get lost in their concepts and responsibilities.
In our article, we consider three main positions in IT industry: the product manager, the project manager, and the program manager. All these specialists are the key players in project development, so it is important to differentiate their professional hues.
