Work SmartrAdvocating safe online habits at home, school and the workplace

Lateral Action has a list of mostly free tools that creative types can use to boost productivity. You probably use many of these already, but in some cases there are features that can make the difference in terms of ease-of-use and efficiency that are just waiting to be discovered.

In the creative world, you don’t have to confine yourself to costly enterprise-level applications. Free (or really affordable) opportunities are available. In this article, I discuss my favorite tools to manage my clients and time online, and I invite you to share your favorite tools of the trade too.

These include Google Docs, Google Calendar, Gmail, invoicing software, time tracking software, and even IM clients. If you’re an online professional like me, or if you run a small business based at home or a small office, then these could be very helpful.

For freelancers and telecommuters, tracking time spent on projects can be difficult or time-consuming. There are software out there you can use to do this, but sometimes these just don’t have the right features, or are too complicated to use.

Sure, you can always use spreadsheet applications, but those can be cumbersome, and you’re constrained to keeping track of stuff on just one computer.

My solution: Google Spreadsheets.

This lets me “time in” so I can easily track how much I spend on my different tasks. The columns I usually use are:

• Date/Day
• Start time
• End time
• Time spent for task
• Total time for the day

– The sum of the individual tasks done for the day

• Total time for the week

– The sum of the time put in for that whole week (Mon to Sun)

• Total time for the month

– The sum of all time put in for a month

Sure, I do have to copy around formulas to different cells. But it’s as easy as Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V. And I do have full control!