The Best Tools To Manage Your Freelance Contractors

While we are enjoying the flexibility of working with remote freelancers, business leaders need to counterbalance the drawbacks of this new world of work. As the remote economy becomes stronger and stronger, Innovative developers come up with better and better solutions. In this post, we review the best apps and services you can use to make coordinating remote teams a breeze. 

Scheduling

In the world of agile sprints and modular design, we still need to set up time slots for real time collaboration and meetings. Identifying the appropriate time slots for you and the freelancers who are likely involved in multiple project at once can be quite cumbersome. Now there are tools that can speed up the tedious scheduling process with novel solutions.

Calendly is one of those options that approach this challenge from the opposite direction: you can set time slots where you are available, and others can book them. You can set up rules like avoiding back-to-back meetings. Calendly can be integrated with most Calendar apps of course, so you don’t need to maintain multiple platforms.

Clockwise takes the burden of identifying suitable time slots and automatically comes up with the time suggestions that are optimal for all parties involved, taking the different time zones and previously determined “safe zones”, like lunch times or deep work slots into consideration.

Doodle is and oldschool choice, but it’s probably the fastest and easiest tool to use if you have a set of determined timeslots you want the participants to choose from on a simple and intuitive UI, taking literally seconds.

Digital Assistance

Voice recognition technology is opening up vast opportunities in the coming years. Digital assistants like Siri or Cortana are already here and millennials are using them confidently. But voice has many use cases, like voice search and dictation. Voice Recognition technology has become so dependable, at least in English, that you can produce good quality text just by talking to the software, taking notes real time or creating written messages just through voice.

MacOS provides this service as a standard now, under Keyboard preferences, but there are some apps like Otter.AI or Dictation.io as a web-based solution. Google has dictation built into Google Docs, under Tools, if you use it via Chrome.

One of the more interesting new solutions is Hound - this voice assistant goes beyond the simple web search when you unleash it to look for some information, it understands a lot of parameters and is able to get the results.

Time tracking

One of the advantages of working with freelancers is that you can adapt and utilize a lot of new solutions to help you manage your time more effectively. ManicTime is a software that logs all activity on your computer and clearly shows you how you have spent the time. This can be an immense help in identifying whether the time you spend on certain projects is in accordance with your own priorities. Clockify is a simple time tracker in which you can set up clients and projects, and you start and stop the time tracking individually for each activity, but it comes with robust visualization and statistics tools, just like Manic Time.

New, exciting apps and services see the light of day from time to time, so managing a remote team is slowly becoming a satisfying flow of effective work - you just need to find the toolkit that works best for your online business activities.