What unique challenges are people in your industry facing right now?
Freelancers face several significant challenges that can impact their productivity and well-being:- Procrastination is a common issue for freelancers, who must self-motivate and hold themselves accountable without the oversight of a boss. While advantageous, this autonomy often requires strong self-discipline.
- Burnout is another major challenge; without adequate time and project management, freelancers may take on too many projects, leading to overwhelming workloads and stress. According to a survey conducted by Fiverr, 64.3% of freelancers are burnt out due to a lack of work-life balance or insufficient time off, and 78.6% believe that more work-life balance would help alleviate their burnout.
- Invoicing can also be a very time-consuming task. As stated in a 2020 research, freelancers spend almost 25% of their overall time on admin tasks, which include invoicing, managing payments, billing, doing paperwork, and more. Freelancers have to meticulously track and count all their billable hours. This process not only eats into their working time but also poses the risk of underbilling if some hours are inadvertently overlooked. These challenges necessitate robust solutions to help freelancers manage their responsibilities more efficiently.
Project and time management tools often include a plethora of functionalities that, while beneficial for larger organizations, can be overwhelming and unnecessary for individuals managing their own schedules and workloads. As a result, freelancers might find these solutions burdensome rather than supportive.
What’s a better way in your opinion to fix these issues?
We collaborate with numerous freelancers on various software projects spread across multiple countries. Initially, we developed PlanArty as an internal tool explicitly tailored to manage and streamline the tracking of billable hours. This tool has been instrumental in reducing the time spent on creating invoices, whether by a freelancer colleague to our company or from us to our clients. Its role in managing billable hours and invoicing is crucial, as it helps us and our freelancers to stay on top of our work and ensure timely payments. Over the years, PlanArty has undergone significant refinements based on our experiences. We identified which features genuinely aid productivity and which ones only add unnecessary complexity. Consequently, we enhanced the beneficial features while either removing or making the extra ones optional. This evolution led to a streamlined process of planning, tracking, and invoicing billable hours.
PlanArty core functionalities effectively address key freelancer challenges:
This comprehensive approach not only combats procrastination by setting clear, manageable daily goals but also eases the typically laborious administrative tasks associated with freelancing.
- By planning tasks in advance, freelancers can clearly see their commitments and avoid overbooking.
- Invoicing becomes remarkably simple: It automatically compiles a list of all hours marked as ‘Billable,’, generates invoices from this data, and, if requested, creates a detailed timesheet to attach to the invoice, offering additional transparency to our clients.
