Tools of the Writing Trade

Freelancing is not always a free-for-all. Sometimes you have to find the right tools to get started and stay motivated. Just recently it was announced that Fiverr bought And.co, which made And.co's services free. That sounded great, though not a lot of us working with Fiverr knew what that meant for us.

The And.co Experience

First, And.co and Fiverr are not integrated (and probably never will be). And.co seems to be a great tool for those who have offline clients. You can set up clients, projects, contracts and more. I was particularly interested in the time tracking feature. I never really know how much time I spend on writing different things for clients, mostly because the ones I work with have everything at a set price, rather than an hourly wage.

I signed up for And.co so that maybe I could track my time doing different freelance work. Turns out, you really have to have offline clients for it to be useful. I first tried using the tracking feature. But to use that, you need to have a project to attach it to. Okay, that's not a problem. I got to create a project, but to create a project you have to have a client attached to it. Ugh. I go to create some dummy client just so I can see how it all works, and creating a dummy client does not work. I didn't want to create a client with my own information, because I didn't want to end up sending invoices to myself.

The verdict? I need to go find a few offline clients to see how well this tool works. So far, it's not for me. I have online clients that already have payment and invoicing systems set up that work for both of us.

Time Tracking is Not Lost

I didn't want to give up the idea of tracking my time working on various projects, so I went on a time tracking hunt. It needed to have features for tracking multiple projects, ease of use, and most importantly it needed to be free. I found TopTracker from Toptal and so far, it's working out well. I'm tracking my time spent writing this blog post now (a few hundred words in only 8 minutes--not bad). I mainly want to use this tracking in order to see what I really make per hour, even though the working world doesn't completely rely on hourly wages anymore. I'm hoping that this analysis will help me determine the best use of my time when it comes to both freelancing and creative writing. I know I'm going to find out that I'm making fractions of cents on the creative stuff, but it will show me where I am now and when I start to improve those numbers.

What types of writing tools do you use for freelancing or creative writing? Does it make it easier to write?