The Art of Going Paperless and Maintaining Productivity

Embracing The Internet

HOW TO TRANSITION FROM PHYSICAL TO ONLINE

Managing Teams Online

LEARN TO MANAGE YOUR TEAM ONLINE

The Art of Going Paperless

LEARN WHAT IT TAKES TO GO PAPERLESS

Close Deals Faster

SIGN DOCUMENTS USING DIGITAL SIGNATURES

Storage and Backup and Summary

BACKUP YOUR DOCUMENTS

HOW TO BRAINSTORM ONLINE

Brainstorming in The Cloud

Table of Contents

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The Art of Going Paperlessand Maintaining Productivity

Being a freelancer is a great career path for most. You can work on your own time and have the freedom to

control your day. But for many

freelancers, work requires mobility; a

precious commodity in today’sconnected society.

Having freelanced for a few years after my career, I remember naivelyexpecting to be able to work with a laptop and cellphone. To my shock,that quickly expanded into an arsenal of pens, paper, books, andorganizational materials. Several projects later, I’ve turned going

paperless into a science. Although I’ve stopped freelancing after thelaunch of my first company, I’ve come to realize that the routine I builtcarried weight across professions.

Becoming a paperless freelancer is a difficult task but, worth the effort. It gives you an advantage in your hyper-competitive career. You can

supercharge your productivity and ensure you can work from any corner ofthe world.

If done it and so can you. In this eBook, you'll learn about tools and

techniques you can implement to go paperless.

TRY FOR FREE

The Problem With Paper

According to The Paperless Project, the amount of paper in a companygrows by 22% per year. The average search time for a misplaceddocument is 18 minutes and the average cost of a lost document starts atan astonishing $350.00!

In order to stay mobile as freelancers, we must decrease our dependenceon paper.

It seems harder than it is but if you make the effort to transition, you’ll reapthe benefit of increased productivity. Your clients and wallet will love youfor it!

We’ve bundled over $500.00 in tools for youFREE

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Embracing The Internet

Before you start recycling your paper, you need to transition yourworkspace from physical to digital. Think about how you keep in touchwith potential clients and how you work with your team. Right now, theremay be a lot of paper moving hands. Let’s minimize that.

1. Let’s Start With The Business Cards

Many freelancers dedicate too much time networking and attending tradeevents. Often, this backfires. You horde stacks of business cards but thenames on them remain foreign so you’re hesitant to throw them away. Aimfor quality over quantity.When speaking with people, go beyond the initial exchange of business

cards and email. In line with going paperless, utilize a CRM (CustomerRelationship Management) solution.

A CRM will help you manage your relationships with contacts, turning theminto clients. Now we need to manage teams.

NEXT: MANAGING TEAMS ONLINE

We’ve bundled over $500.00 in tools for youFREE

Where should we send the kit?

Managing Teams Online

Don’t attempt to manage your teamof subcontracted freelancers throughemail. Communicating remotely isdifficult; communicating remotelywith someone from another region ofthe world is harder. When not doneright, you’ll end up repeating work to

fix issues that proper communication methods could have avoided. Tosucceed, pick the ideal project management tool that fits your style ofwork.

Ask others in your industry for recommendations on an online projectmanagement tool. You’ll quickly realize that freelancers who do the sametype of work utilize the same sets of tools. Our personal favorite, Podio,allows you to manage an entire project on one page.

NEXT: BRAINSTORMING ON THE CLOUD

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Brainstorming in the Cloud

When you start a new project with aclient, you want to make sureeveryone is on the same page. Ashared vision leads to a sharedsuccess.

Understand that every person isgoing to have a different vision forwhat defines a successful project. Just look up the term “Shared vision” onGoogle and you’ll realize that 203 million results means that vision is asticking point for a lot of people.

So instead of presenting your vision on pen and paper every time you meetbetween your clients and team members, brainstorm online through toolslike RealtimeBoard. If you can visualize your workflow and collaborateonline, you can guarantee a shared vision as well as a shared success.

NEXT: CLOSE DEALS FASTER

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Where should we send it?

Close Deals Faster

In the same way that you manageand coordinate teams, move all ofyour document signing online. Thistechnique is essential for increasedproductivity and speed.

There are many tools available thatoffer online electronic signature

solutions. My tool of choice is for the past year has been PandaDoc, wellbefore I started working with them.

When you send out documents online for signature, you want to make surethat they are received, and then returned with a signature in a timelymanner and not lost in your client’s inbox.

Even though this seems simple, according to a leading Silicon Valleybased technology research firm, the average business inbox receives 105emails per day. Despite spam filters, roughly 19% of those emails are spam.Your email can easily be mistaken for that 19%.

With PandaDoc’s analytics feature, when you send documents out forsignature, you will see when your receiver views, signs, and completes the document. This ensures a fast turn around

NEXT: STORAGE, BACKUP, AND SUMMARY

Storage and Backup

None of this effort would matter if you sought to store your documents onyour laptop. Although hard drives come with 2 – 3 year warranties, andmore enterprise level drives include up to 5 years, all it takes is one virusto ruin everything you’ve had.

You can add virus protection to your laptops, take precautions whenopening emails and add several layers of security but at some point yourhard drive will crash, and you won’t see it coming.

With the prevalence of cheap to free online storage, there is no reason tonot back up your essential files online. Take a look at Dropbox, GoogleDrive, Box, and iCloud. Pick one.

I personally recommend Google Drive. A free account gets you 15gigabytes of space equal to roughly 60,000 documents.

Summary

Start with the immediate documents in your immediate workflow andmove outward towards the documents you send out to clients and teammembers.

Paper affects productivity in more ways than one. Embrace technologyand the internet to lessen your dependence on physical documents. Asyou slowly evolve your workflow as a freelancer, you’ll begin to noticedrastic changes in your level of work output which will increase yourbottom line and give you more time to build meaningful relationships withyour clients.

Go paperless, stay mobile, and remain ahead of your competition.

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