Hey folks, I recently read an Interview With Adrian Diaconescu of Rubiqube. I would like to share part of the interview which talked about essential tools that Adrian used for his freelance work. If you don’t know who is Adrian, here is a short introduction on him:-

My name is Adrian Diaconescu and I’m a freelance designer based in Bucharest, Romania.

Professionally speaking, I tried pretty much everything: the 9 to 5 job, the entrepreneurship,the corporate world. I took the plunge and quit my last day job in March 2007. Since then, I made a lot of new friends and worked on many cool projects.

Freelance design is an exciting form of freelance work, which can be of great fun, creativeness and challenging . However, to successful, modern day designers must use various kinds of available tools. Here is the essential tools to help you success :-

Adobe Fireworks CS3

It is a product from Adobe, which is widely in use for creating and optimising images for the web and rapidly prototyping websites. The primary advantages the software renders are its ability to integrate between Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, improved layer organisation, improved scaling, integrating Adobe Bridge, customisable asset, integration between Flash and Dreamweaver and multi-page support. I guess most of the freelance designers should know about this tool. Personally, I am using Adobe Photoshop to edit some simple images on this blog. Perhaps, I should try out Fireworks as well.

Skype

Well-known application to make phone calls over Internet. It is actually free when the called person is also using Skype, while calls to landlines and cell phones can be made for a pretty low affordable cost. All in all it’s a one-stop shop when it comes to communication with your clients. Personally, I’ve been using it to call my customers from oversea in a very low rate. I guess, the rate is cheaper than the rate offered by any of the local telco such as Maxis, Celcom or Digi.

Thunderbird/FireFox

Mozilla Thunderbird is a free, open source, cross-platform e-mail and news client developed by the Mozilla Foundation. It has number of features that makes it arguably one of the most efficient products in its field. Personally, I would recommend you to Add-On the FireBug to help on website designing. Another good add-on is the color picker which you simply capture a color from any nice website.

Pymo

It is a web portal aimed at the freelancer and managers who are looking for solution to manage, schedule time allocation and adjustments for the involved projects. It has a central database with all employee timesheets in one place, generate the detailed timesheet reports for each employee (in fact reports on employee performance can also be generated). It is ideal for geographically distributed teams. Use this tool to keep track on your project management.

Wordpress

Software that furnishes a way to manage your website is commonly called a CMS or "Content Management System". Wordpress is such kind of web based blogging tool. It has various useful and necessary features. Now, blogging is part of the lifestyle for Freelance Designer. Most of them use blog as the platform to showcase their freelance portfolio just like what Adrian did. Perhaps, you should have a good showcase to show off your previous works. It helps in gaining confident from your client.

These were few of the most reputed and useful tools for freelance Designers. Effective use of these tools can really make your freelance life a lot easier.

In freelance business, invoicing is requires a great and meticulous treatment in a regular basis. One mistake in this regard can cause significant damage as far as loosing the client. Invoicing means the tasks related to financial aspects of your business. Such as record keeping of your earnings, expenses and profit. Then comes the part of billings, in fact all these are grouped together to be termed as invoicing in a freelance work.

The steps regarding a sound processing of invoicing should encompass easiness in invoicing, securing important data, having effective backup policies etc. This article will illustrate a tool to fulfill these objectives.

The tool is a web portal naming Freshbooks.com. This site has been launched to effectively address the drudgery of billing and many other shortcomings regarding creating invoices in few other softwares. The objective is to save your time, user friendliness, offering a secure and encrypted environment to store the data and accessibility for 24/7.

There are several advantages for which this service has gained popularity in more than 100 countries worldwide:-

• Creating and managing invoices with extreme ease and enjoyable manner.
• Time tracking for expenses.
• Propagating invoices through both snail mail and email.
• Secure acceptance of your payment through Authorize.NET, PayPal, etc.
• Auto-Send capability regarding forwarding invoices and late payment notices.
• Preparing robust reports through an effective report generation module and exporting/importing securely and reliably.

The portal is actually not limited to freelancers only, any other work that requires time management and invoicing can use this product. In the blog section, you can find plenty of useful articles such as Digital Security Practices and Programming Issues.

All in all, it is a great tool. An effective use of it can reap great benefit for individuals and company as a whole.

This post is guest blogged by Asif Karim.

In contemporary era, the word ‘Outsourcing’ has ingrained as an intrinsic fraction of basically any class of business. Though the process saw its inception as early as 1960, it is only the recent years that has brought the theory of outsourcing into practice in a much wider and extended spectrum than ever before.

One of the crux reason of such expansion of this practice can be attributed to the fact that any major arena of businesses now days are being carried out world wide, in a globalize nature. Also, the integration of technology, especially Information Technology into the business process itself has opened up new specialized area to look after, making the overall control and grip of the business more convoluted and diverse.

Therefore the age-long diction of managing the business had to be matured in some way, and Outsourcing has been assimilated with the most positive favor for overall management of discrete business process, thus directly permitting the top level management to focus on the main business elements without crying over less-prioritized side process.

So the first question pops up is what exactly it means. In the simplest word, it refers to arrange a subcontract  with a third-party corporation for establishing and maintaining a part of the bona-fide business. Such as designing, accounting, human resource, IT infrastructure such as Firewall monitoring, managing Virtual Private Network (VPN), Hosting Services etc.

However, Outsourcing encompasses both advantages and disadvantages. In this section of the article, we must first concentrate on few crucial advantages that can be exploited to the maximum for the overall well being of the business and it’s functionality.

, It is 11pm now, where is my homework? How to finish my homework? I guess everybody will have these problems during your college time. Do you think time is never enough for you to get everything done? Blame yourself why always running late? Here are some tips for controlling of your time and organizing your life, so become a productive person:

1. Make a "To Do" List Every Morning.

our daily to-do list will keep you moving towards your goals on a daily basis. Take 10 minutes every night and make a to-do list for the next day. Then, start to prioritize each of these tasks. I would suggest you to try on Mind Mapping on planning your To-Do List. At the end of the to-do list, highlight the rewards for accomplish all the tasks. It drives you to complete all the tasks.

2. Use Free Time Wisely.

Get some reading done on the public transport ride home from school, for example, and you’ll kill two birds with one stone.