It’s essential for designers and developers to stay organised so they can spend less time searching, billing, looking for things etc. and more time thinking and creating. Whether you’re a web designer, freelancer, artist, or in an entirely different ball game, these must-have tools will help you take care of business. I’ve also added a few of my faves as well.
1. Shift
Shift is an email client that makes managing multiple accounts, across Mail, Calendar, Drive and web apps including extensions, easy. Rather than opening up multiple tabs, or browsers, to toggle between your accounts, Shift brings everything you need into one beautiful interface. Shift also support for Google Services, Slack, Asana, Trello, Evernote, Facebook, Jira, Invision, Grammarly, Boomerang, and much more, Shift makes it easy for busy people to stay productive.
Price: Basic: Free/Pro $29.99 per year/Advanced $99.99 per year
2. Trello
Trello is an easy, free, is a flexible and versatile organisation tool to manage anything whether it be used to organise campaigns, keep track of projects, create product roadmaps, feature requests and so on. Trello is a flexible and versatile organisation tool.
Price: Free/Business Class $9.99 (per user/per month) /Enterprise $20.83 or less (per user/per month)
3. Basecamp
Basecamp is a project management & team communication application, and this app is fantastic as it helps you keep track of your projects in a single place. With Basecamp you can use it internally within your team or by yourself. Plus it also works great with external clients or freelancers as it helps keep everything you’re working on organised in a single place.
Price: $99 per month
4. Whipnote
Whipnote is an impressive tool as it transcribes conference calls from speak to text. You can focus on meetings and on the other people you’re conversing with instead of taking notes. Plus, the tool provides complete transcript histories of meetings to browse through in the future.
Price: Free
5. Memory AI by Timely
Memory AI is a time-tracking tool powered by artificial intelligence, it allows you to go about doing your work without the worry about time tracking as it can be helpful if you want to log hours automatically and create automatic time sheets.
Price: Solo $7.00 per month/Essential $7.00 per month/Company $14.00 per month
6. And Co
And Co is a beautiful, super-intuitive and completely free tool. It helps freelancers and design studios keep track of invoices, contracts, payments and time management. The app gives you a good overview of money coming in and money going out also what’s yet to be paid by clients.
Price: Free
7. Todoist
Todoist is a task management tool, it’s great for individuals and teams. Todoist is well known for its collaboration abilities as well as an efficient organisation structure. It works on about any platform and does come as a plugin for most browsers. It also integrates with Gmail and Outlook to make sure it’s helping anywhere you are working.
Price: Free/ Premium $29.00 per year/ Business $29.00 per user/per year
8. Boomerang
With Boomerang you can keep your email organised, and you can write an email now and schedule it to be sent automatically at the perfect time. Just write the messages as you usually would, then click the Send Later button. The handy calendar picker or Boomerang text box that understands language like “next Monday” so to tell Boomerang when to send your message.
Price: Basic Free/Personal $4.99 per month/Pro $14.99 per month/Premium $49.99 per month
9. Zapier
Zapier is an awesome tool for creating all kinds of automation, and it’s keeps the lives of busy people flowing smoother by taking care of the tedious and repetitive tasks for you.
Price: Depends, prices based on how much you automate.
10. Zeplin
Zeplin is a fantastic tool for sharing design files between designers & developers. It helps keep design details organised. Also it just makes the hand-off part easier. It’s a fantastic tool for keeping the final designs and hand-offs elements all in one spot. Zeplin works with Sketch, Adobe XD, Photoshop and Figma.
Price: Free/Starter $17.00 per month/Business $26.00/Organization $122.40 per month
Those are just 10 tools that can help you out but there’s so many other tools such the complete GSuite tools, the collaborative tool Slack, the beautiful business & accounting software Xero and some file sharing apps like Box and Dropbox.
