How do you manage your work?

[paulmaplesden]

The Fiverr work management system and dashboard looks like an effective way to manage orders, customers, and gigs in Fiverr. If all your freelance work in on Fiverr, it’s an effective way of staying on top of things.

For sellers who also freelance outside the platform, how do you stay on top of all the daily tasks, clients, orders, and creative work you need to do? I’ve been asking myself how to work more effectively for many years (I am a productivity geek). I use a set of online tools and automations to ensure I stay on top of all my work, no matter where it is.

In fact, I think it’s partly the ability to manage workload and deadlines effectively that makes a successful freelancer. In the three or so years I have been writing full-time, I have never missed a deadline. Here’s what my workflow looks like:

1. The work comes in, via Fiverr or from one of my regular clients.
2. I book the work in my “Client Relationship Management” (CRM) system - this lets me make sure I keep regular contact with all my clients and lets me understand where all the possible work I have is in the pipeline. It also helps me develop customer relationships, which is vital for future work. The CRM I use is HubSpot CRM, which is free.
3. I use an automation tool called “Zapier” to copy any booked work from HubSpot CRM into Trello.
4. Trello is an amazingly simple project management tool and is the main place I track and complete work. It works on a concept of “Boards” (main workspace), “Lists” (buckets of work, e.g. today, this week, this month), and “Cards” actual work tasks (in this case, orders. Each card has the name of the order on one side together with the due date, and the details on the other.

Here’s my Trello setup.

5. I can view all of my work in either list or calendar view, making it easy to schedule my time and make sure I meet deadlines.
6. I do the work - I use the Toggl time tracker to track how long I am spending on orders to make sure I am spending time efficiently. I copy my time entries into a Google Sheet automatically and add in price details so I can work out my earnings per hour and per day.
7. I typically work in Google Docs - it makes the writing and reviewing process fast and painless.
8. Once work is completed I share it with the client and await revisions.
9. I then move on to the next task, until all is done!

I realize this is far more than people just selling on Fiverr need, but for a busy freelancer juggling a dozen clients and 20 pieces of work at a time, it’s vital to stay on top of everything!

If you have any good productivity tools, hacks, or processes you use, I would love to hear them!

[ryangillam]

I have a notebook by my computer where I plan exactly what I am going to do that day to the minute. I may be knocked off this plan slightly for various reasons, maybe lose a couple of minutes here and there when I am feeling tired.

At some point, I get frustrated with my plan and it gets screwed up and tossed across the room. Then I just do whatever I feel like. For example; if you are a client sending forever stupid messages, or changing the details of what you want AFTER you have messaged me, then you get bumped to the end of my queue, because that is annoying. You could have been the next gig that I had to do, 3 days before the deadline, but if you suddenly say:

“On second thoughts I want…”

“If you get this done quickly or give me a bonus I will…”

Then you are scratched off my list!

It all starts with a plan, though.

Every morning, one client has fully booked me for an hour, so I know that she is getting done at a specific time. That never changes.

I have an Excel spreadsheet for content for my own websites.

[Guest jenihiggs]

I just use old fashioned and pen and paper. I have a planner and highlighters for different tasks. I had to use trello a couple of years ago when I was on the Op/Ed staff of a local newspaper (they made everyone use trello), but I always like paper best. I guess it’s weird, but I was always a note-taker. Writing stuff down helps me plan and organize, and I remember everything better.

[keywordsseo]

If you have a team on different platforms I suggest using an online collaboration tool like Fluxes or Trello. I personally like Fluxes.com as it’s a great free tool. It lets you create as many project boards you want and add unlimited team members. There is no limitation to how many tasks you can add. So create a project, create daily task list with deadline and assign them to team members. You can also have live chat with team members in a project board. This is probably the best free tool out there.

[ej_digital]

We have a team. So the methods that we use are MantisBT, OpenProjects, SuiteCRM to manage our projects. It all depends on the type of project, where you are using multiple resources per task etc.

Each team member is assigned their job and reporting etc is done via a common platform. Which has got a Fiverr Order tracking number, Deadlne etc. If the task is a daily task - it is updated on daily basis and at of the task we can create a report and submit it.

It all depends on what is your setup and how you are working on the same.

I forgot to add, if you are a Freelancer, Google Keep - it is a perfect tool rather the looking at others.

[techjosh]

This might be helpful. I should check this out…