To love me is to know my kink is PRODUCTIVITY. I love re-organizing the files on my GDrive, color coding my calendar, and updating Asana Boards. As a freelancer and business owner you’re going to be managing multiple jobs, multiple tasks, and multiple people all at once. The last thing you want to do is have all your s**t all over the place. In order for me to keep Brainwash up and running, I’ve adopted a few likkle hacks that keep my head on straight (most of the time).

Keep ya inbox clear and ya team in the loop with Slack

Have you ever missed an email from a team member because your inbox was filled with FashionNova coupons and Uber receipts? Use Slack to communicate internally. Slack works just like GChat or any instant messaging app. It even allows you to have separate threads to have separate conversations. It feels as immediate as texting but creates this separation between your personal conversations and your creative ones. Download the Slack app for your phone and desktop and conversations won’t fall through the cracks.

Manage clients and all 582 projects at once with Asana

Great— you’ve suddenly gone from no work to 34 new projects and 10 of them have to be completed within the month. How do you keep track of it all? Meet Asana, the Don Dada of project management. You can form teams, create boards, and assign folks tasks. It can even sync to your calendar. If you’re someone who works with several clients at once or creates content and need to manage your editorial calendar, this is where you do it. Ooh, and if you throw events this could help you keep everything from your sponsorship tasks to production all in one place. If you take nothing away from this article, please download Asana right now.

Lock in and track your time with Toggl and Google Calendar

Nothing is more important than mastering your time. You’ll be surprised how much time you spend sifting through emails and scheduling meetings. Toggl is a Google Chrome extension that allows you to track just how many minutes you’re spending on each task. For creatives who sell various services, it’s important that you understand how long each job will take. If it takes you 5 hours to create a pitch deck, you may want to re-consider charging $50 for one. Toggl allows you to figure out where each one of those 24 hours is going and if some of them need to be allocated elsewhere.

Once you figure out how much time is needed for each task, time to block out your schedule. Batch processing, or streamlining your processes so that you do similar tasks together, allow you to decrease distractions and knock out your tasks quicker. For example, if you find yourself scheduling meetings randomly, consider only having meetings from 9am-1pm Monday through Friday.

Check off every task on your to-do list with Evernote

I have this weird obsessive habit of waking up in the middle of the night thinking about all of the s**t I have to do the next day. The key to a successful to-do list is keeping it short and keeping it accessible. If you don’t think to check your notebook for the list of tasks you have to do for the day, what’s the point in even having the list? Use Evernote to keep all of your to-do lists in one place. You can access your lists on any platform and can even share it with other folks.

Collect ya coin$ with Freshbooks

Nothing is more annoying as a freelancer than having to chase a check. Freshbooks allows you to keep track of what is owed to you and even generate automated reminders to your clients to run you your money. You can track all of your expenses and how much money is owed to you. A must have.