Meet Your Deadlines –25 Productivity Tools for Designers
Featured Image: Pexels/Black ice
“50.7% of the respondents reported frequent Internet procrastination, and respondents spent 47% of on-line time procrastinating.” – Jennifer Lavoie
There are multitudes of distractions on the computer that you have access to which tempts you away from getting your graphic design work finished. Social networks, video sites, and internet games can make being productive a difficult endeavor when you are unable to focus.
Unfortunately, there are only 24 hours a day and as a freelance designer, you need manage your time to work on your current projects, network for new clients, update your portfolio, and spend whatever free time you have to build new design skills and read current industry news. We won’t mention various other parts of your day like spending time with your family and keeping up with your social life.
There are tools out there for you to use that can help you get back the hours in your day by helping you stay on task and make more time for you to do what you really want to do, design. If you have trouble focusing your work efforts to do what you really want to do, check out these time management tools.
Task planners and time trackers
Measures the actual hours you are working. It finds out how much time you waste, makes you focus on one task at a time, and allows you to share the results with your friends to help keep you on track.
Download this Google Chrome extension to block your biggest time-wasting sites. It works like a timer, and asks you to set the maximum time you want to waste on your customized time-killer sites before they’re blocked.
Clearly defines work and break times in a fun way and helps you build a time management system. The technique has the notion that taking short, scheduled breaks when working eliminates the “running on fumes” feeling you get when you’ve pushed yourself too hard.
This program runs in the background and watches and records how long you spend on each application or activity as you go. It will then generate an analysis of how you’re using your time to help you plan more effectively for the next week.
A task management tool with great integrations, it’s available on multiple platforms. It will generate a report for you too.
If you want to keep track of how long you have been working on a project, this tool is great for that. But what separates it from other tools is you can try to beat your previous time on your tasks to improve efficiency.
Collaborating tools for projects
Framebench focuses on real-time communication, collaboration and sync which gives it an edge over the other tools. You can interact with files online, draw over them, leave comments, mark pages, and collaborates and synchronized views with your team and your clients from a single location inside itself.
A cloud-based productivity tool that lets you customize an easy-to-revise virtual mind map and you can collaborate with others on a project, even on your phone. It is best for visual people because it’s focused on goals rather than lists and orders.
Helps you organize your projects, managing files, and keeps you in line with task management. You can communicate with clients directly and deliver designs with version control. It manages feedback commenting and to-do lists. It also has permission tools to let you control what is visible to internal teams and external clients.
A useful tool for quickly and easily creating click walk-throughs to preview web designs. It allows enabling and disabling comments on specific areas of designs, statistics on what designs have been viewed. What’s the catch? To get more storage space, you have to refer people to the service.
A website mockup tool you can’t go without, it can create, link together, preview, and share mock-ups of your website or application. You can drag and drop UI elements to the page, then rearrange and resize them. You can even link multiple mock-ups together and preview them interactively to get a feel for the flow of your application. Best of all, it’s fully web-based and will export your wireframes to PDF and PNG.
This website is used to organize, help present, and collaborate on your design projects. It also has version control for your designs.
From sketches to fully coded pages, this app lets teams give feedback faster at every step of the design process.
This web site has 50+ types of diagrams with specialized features to help you draw faster and better with thousands of examples and comprehensive shape libraries. It also has real-time collaboration to help you work with clients and colleagues where ever you are.
Support and development services
Check desktop browser and mobile support with compatibility tables for HTML5, CSS3, SVG and more in desktop and mobile browsers.
A website mockup tool, it helps you see how it will look in a browser. It takes your image file and displays it online, in a browser, to give you and your client a true impression of how the site will look.
Resize my browser
Web professionals need to regularly test how a website appears on different browser sizes, but completing this task manually involves a lot of your quality time. This tool can ease your task. It allows you to preview the website in predetermined dimensions for popular browser sizes.
If you are tired of reloading the page as you develop your web site, this tool allows CSS edits and image changes to apply live.
It’s tough to find a good vector graphics editor, but this is free and open sourced. It’s a professional vector graphics editor for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
Make it easier for clients to give feedback
An easy way to manage content review and approval, it can be read anywhere and has over 140+ file types supported. People with little technical expertise will have no issues getting around the UI, making comments and submitting decisions a breeze.
Capture and share screenshots of web pages easily by only entering the URL. The tool also allows you to click and drag the screenshots and make notes. You can also post your screen shots on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.
Screenshot tool for web development, it gives annotated screenshots of the current browser content delivered to your bug tracker/project management tool. Its best feature is it helps you to avoid non-reproducible bug reports from your customers by giving your customers sticky notes and a highlighter in their browser. They can annotate and describe what they see on your web page. Then what they snap is sent directly to your bug tracker or project management tool. You’ll find a detailed review of the best business project management software on Cloudwards.
You can make a clickable and interactive prototype design, complete with gestures, transitions, and animations to help clients see what you can offer.
Invoicing your client to get paid
An automated accounting software, it saves you time because it’s refreshingly straightforward. It helps you log your time, logging expenses, and then will draw up an invoice for you.
A professional invoicing and time tracking app for your Mac, iPad, and iPhone, it has designed invoice templates for you to use, and adds project expenses, mileage, and track time on your iOS device. You can store it locally too, so it isn’t used through the internet.
Know of any other good productivity tools? Did we list one you hate or find annoying? Tell us in the comments below, or tweet us @ZillionDesigns!
The proofing tool is certainly worth looking over because of the feature to edit right on the file. Saves a lot of time. Thanks for sharing! 🙂