Happy Mardi Gras, reporters! ðŸŽ
Usually I wouldn’t send this issue until next Tuesday, but I wanted to get this one out in time for the NICAR conference, where I’m leading a conversation for freelancers. If you’re at NICAR, don’t be a wallflower. Hit me up!
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How to Break Free Break into Freelancing
Freelancing is kinda livin’ the dream. Also kinda living a nightmare of deadlines, uneven income and disorganization. Here are the tools I use!
- Trello is a pumped-up organize-everything tool, and I use it as a To Do List, because that’s always hard thing to find. I would recommend learning the keyboard shortcuts to make it as seamless as possible.
- HelloSign affixes a legal signature onto documents like W9s and contracts. It saves the trouble of printing and scanning (who even uses paper anymore?) and you get three free documents a month.
- Evernote is what I use when I do need to scan, as well as a giant homebase for all my investigative projects.
- Quickbooks tracks business expenses, which is something you should do even if you’re not a freelancer. Even the Quickbooks subscription itself is deductible. All in all, I think this app saved me about $1,000 last year (!). Here’s an intro code for 50% off if you want to save even more.
Freelancers are so varied in what they use – I read one article lately about a freelancer who tracks everything through Excel, which kind of blows my mind.
What do you use?