As a web worker, I rely on a huge variety of desktop and web tools everyday to get my work done.
It's
nice, I have no corporate IT staff telling me what I can and can't use.
This freedom has allowed me to try just about every tool under the sun
in an effort to find those that truly help me work more efficiently and
reach new levels of productivity.
No. I am not about to list
every tool out there because I don't want this to turn into a debate
pitting free/open-source versus paid, closed down applications (or any
variation thereof). Going in, know that there probably at least 10
niche applications for every task you'll face in life. As that thought
settles in, you'll quickly realize that we're talking about thousands
of tools.
So let's par things down a little and talk about five
essential sets of tools. To me, each set is something that all web
workers must consider to form a solid foundation or toolbox. Regardless
of the project you're working on, these are handy sites, apps, and
solutions that you need to consider. Writing And Editing Whenever
we talk about web working or telecommuting, it's key to remember that
your writing skills will quickly become your calling card, your
finished product, your proposal, your sales pitch, your marketing plan,
etc. Get it? You need to have at least average writing skills.
After
the huge growth of blogosphere, blogs have now become the huge source
of attention and exposure and we can find almost everyone, ranging from
designers and internet marketers, writing on their blogs. Gone are the
days when Microsoft Word and PowerPoint serve as our rulers. There are
tons of new alternatives that can be employed to help you in writing,
editing and creating great blog posts or copy in general.
and
are good online tools to get some writing done. Most of the blogging
platforms have their default editors but for those who like to play
with desktop alternatives, for Windows and for Mac are pretty cool. If you love simplicity then tools like are made for you. And yes, are still very much used by writers.
To write and edit, you need to do research first and take relevant notes. ,
which has both online and desktop versions, does this job brilliantly.
You can even capture text and images with its web clipper. To edit
those images, you could go for simple tools like Irfanview for the desktop and online tools like . However, if you really need a robust image editor then is the ultimate tool.
The last step is a good proofread so be sure to do more than a spell check. Check out some of the we previously mentioned. Storage And Synchronization You
deal with data everyday and it's clearly very important to take care of
it. Your computer is a machine and it is as vulnerable as any other
machine. Your hard drive can die any day without warning you and if you
don't have a backup, you could lose critical data to the point of
jeopardizing your career or business.
Be wise and backup everyday using an external hard drive. I personally use the
If you want to take it a step further and backup the backup, I recommend you sign up with an online backup service like .
That way you can rest assured knowing that if your external hard drive
gives up for some reason, (or if it's stolen) there is a backup at
another location too.
There are many backup and synchronization
tools available which make the entire process of backing up effortless
for you. One such tool is a free option named for Windows. If you need something more robust, here is a to review.
To sync data between two locations, like your computer and external hard drive, you can use
for Windows which is freely available. If there are Mac users reading
this, I'd like to know from them what tools they use to backup and sync
stuff.
Organizers Organizing
your work as a web worker is important too. If you are good at manually
keeping track of your tasks using a simple moleskin notebook then
that's good. However, if you want a paperless environment, for the desktop and or in fact are cool online apps that will help you.
There are many tools for keeping track of your time. Another good free option is which can help you to track your time while working on projects.
Communication For communication, apart from the basic telephone, I think email and are the best bets. When it comes to email,
is undoubtedly the king. With a host of features and the ease of use,
it's easily the preferred email tool for web workers. Some of us also
like to maintain a desktop tool for checking the emails. They can
easily with Outlook and Thunderbird and read and reply to emails from desktop.
Invoicing You
won't get paid if you don't invoice your clients and doing all of that
manually is a total pain. I personally use Paypal's inbuilt invoicing
tool which lets me create an invoice easily and also saves the invoice
templates for future use.
and are two other good alternatives for invoice and payment management.
I'd love to hear from you about the tools which you use as a web worker and the ones which make you more productive everyday.
Cheers,
Abhijeet and
which comes with 500GB of storage space. So far, it's worked well for
me. However, there are many alternatives so shop around and get
something that makes sense for your environment.
