If you are a freelancer or entrepreneur, you’re a creator and you’re joining the ranks of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Vitruvius. (Don’t know Mr. da Vinci? Go to the science center, dude.) Okay, maybe you’re not that good and no one is commissioning you to paint the Sistine Chapel. But you and ‘Mike’ are cut from the same cloth – you’re both making something beautiful from nothing at all.

To do this hard work, it’s advisable to get the right tools. Sure, you can survive without them. In fact, it’s not the camera that takes good photos, it’s the person behind the camera. But once you get going and know the field better, having good tools will make life easier and allow you to concentrate on the real work of imagining and problem-solving.

Yes, this week’s episode on freelancing is about productivity tools.

The Journal

Leonardo da Vinci is famous for his journal and you should have one too. Your journal is the place where you jot down everything and I do mean everything – half-baked ideas, problems you encounter, solutions that worked and attemps that failed, dreams and plans for the future, ah-ha moments, procedures for doing things, and important contacts.

I’ve played with many solutions over the years, so there’s definitely isn’t one-size-fits-all method here. You’ll just have to try and be persistant in finding the tool that fits your work style.

Some recommendations:

• MediaWiki - Great for linking between pages, naturally multi-player, has an expressive and simple syntax, and you can insert jpgs within your notes.
• DokuWiki - Another wiki. DokuWiki stores pages in plain text files - no database needed. This makes backup easy and you can easily write scripts to generate documentation.
• TiddlyWiki - A personal notework wiki. It’s rather unique. Go play with it to see what I mean.
• Evernote - Great for syncing across devices, but the free plan is capped.
• Pen, paper and scanner - The old-fashioned way with a modern twist. Write and draw as you would, and scan them to keep a backup and for sharing. Moleskine notebooks are all the rage but dollar store notepads also work (You can get three pocket-sized, spiral-bound notepads for $1).
• Google Docs - Word processing, spreadsheets, presentations. All in the cloud, searchable, and you can see what others are doing in real-time.

Project management tools

If you on a team, you’ll want to know who is doing what. If you’re working solo, you’ll want to know what you were working on last - especially for complicated projects with multiple milestones and components.

• AppTrajectory - Brought to you by the guys at ThoughtBot. There’s a 14-day free trial.
• PivotalTracker
• Checkvist - No frills to-do list. There are keyboard-shortcuts for just about everything, which makes it appeal to the command-line guy within me. Lists can be shared and the layout looks great on mobile.
• Remember the Milk - The classic to-do list that’s feature-rich and mobile apps are available.
• Trello - Brought to you by the guys at Fog Creek. At it’s core, it’s a to-do list, but you can create multiple lists and drag to-dos between them. Great for projects that have definable processes/stages.

Communication tools

Teamwork means communication. When I’m evaluating communication tools, I look for how easy it is to send something to someone: text, image files, code snippets, screenshots, links, videos. Search and chat history is a must. Notifications (pinging someone when they are not in the room) is also a necessity.

• Hipchat - HipChat makes it simple to create your own chatrooms. You can easily attach images and files - they get uploaded to Amazon S3 and your team can click a link to download it. There are mobile apps for iOS and Android, and you can communicate via text message as well.
• Google Apps - The built-in chat client in Gmail is nice, but we’ve had some issues with it. Manually inviting your team into the chatroom each time gets tiresome, and it gets worse if when they get automatically booted out of the room due to inactivity. (Maybe Google fixed this by now?) The upside is you get Google+ Hangouts and screen-sharing, all for free.

File sharing

Some documents need to be shared, such as PDFs of legal documents and invoices.

• Dropbox - Everyone knows Dropbox, right?
• SSH-enabled server - This is easy to set up. This guarantees your information is not being given to a 3rd-party and you can do it for cheap/next to nothing if you already have a web server.

I’m sure there are lots of other services and tools out there. If you’ve fallen in love with your tools, rave about it in the comments! I’d love to increase my productivity!