In the first blog post in this series, we talked about Friction Losses and Opportunity Losses. Ofuz is chock full of task management and collaboration tools that help freelancers reduce Friction Losses.

Ofuz also helps you reduce Opportunity Losses. An Opportunity Loss is when you’re so busy doing your thing that you don’t have time to develop new business opportunities and leads. Ofuz allows you to import contacts from Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and any other CSV file source. After you’ve gotten all of your contacts into Ofuz, you can start to use the mailing list management, contact tagging, and note-taking capabilities in Ofuz to work your network and avoid opportunity losses.

Unifying Your Contacts Using Ofuz

Ofuz makes it easy for our freelancer to import his existing contacts from a variety of sources. Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, vCards, and any CSV-formatted list of contacts is game for importing to Ofuz. Our freelancer does the following to import contacts from his Gmail account into Ofuz:

1. Click Settings (top right of the page).
2. Click Sync.
3. Click Google.
4. Click Import Contacts.
5. In the Email field, type your Gmail address and then click Import.

Creating new contacts in Ofuz is also dead simple:

1. Click the Contacts tab.
2. In the top left of the page, click add new contact.
3. Complete the Add a new contact form.
4. Click Add this person.

Now that our freelancer has all of his contacts in Ofuz, he can use the powerful tagging feature in Ofuz to categorize and selectively act on these contacts. Let’s say that our freelancer wants to create four categories for his contacts:

• Current Customers
• Prospects
• Past Customers
• Peers

To tag multiple contacts, our freelancer would simply:

1. Click the Contacts tab.
2. Click in the white space next to each contact you want to tag.
3. The white space around the selected contacts will become light yellow.
4. In the text box above the selected contacts, type the tag you want to assign to those contacts.
5. Click add tags.

A Short Detour: Why Email For Marketing and Lead Generation?

Next to ranking highly in search engine results, email marketing is the most effective way to generate sales. This is true for large corporations, and it’s true for a freelancer. A Direct Marketing Association (DMA) survey for 2009 showed that email marketing returns $43.62 for every dollar spent. We’re not talking about SPAM here, but targeted email to people who have given you their permission to send them emails. That DMA survey isn’t just an isolated data point. Surveys by Forbes, Datran Media, and Shop.org also agree about the effectiveness of email marketing. Read this handy guide to email marketing for the freelancer.

Because you can assign multiple tags to a single contact, you don’t have to pick only one category for each contact. For example, our freelancer can have contacts who are both past customers and prospects. This multiple tagging feature allows our freelancer to be very selective when sending group emails to his contacts. With Ofuz, he creates very specific group mailings — without needing separate mailing list management software.

For example, he can create an email template for a newsletter. He can use the newsletter to provide current and past customers with relevant, useful information like tips related to their business, along with incentives to hire our freelancer. By sending periodic emails to past customers, our freelancer stays at the top of their list for future gigs.

Conclusion

A lot of freelancers are trying to find a way out of a familiar feast and famine cycle. The key to a sustainable freelance business is steady, constant business development. Linking your contacts and your business development to Ofuz means that even in your busiest times you can manage to keep your prospects warm – filling in all those famine times with more contracts.

In part two of this blog post, we’ll look at how how Ofuz can help you generate new leads for your mailing list.

In the meantime, sign up for a free Ofuz account to see for yourself how easy it is to manage your contacts using Ofuz.

In the previous post we saw how our freelancer can use Ofuz task notes, bulk emails, and the file sharing portal to streamline their day-to-day workflow. Today we’ll see how our freelancer gets things done with less effort using the great task and timesheet management functionality of Ofuz.

Integrated Task Management

Ofuz has a terrific set of task management features. Tasks are linked to a project, and each task can have a due date, a category, and notes.

Previously, our freelancer was using two applications to manage tasks and time for his workflow. He was using Harvest for timesheets, and Basecamp for task and project management. Although he was pretty pleased with the functionality of these two tools, he disliked having to manage multiple logins and interfaces. He was often copying data from one to the other, and his computer screen was clogged with browser windows.

When he switched to Ofuz for task and time management, our freelancer’s workflow started to look like this:

1. Login to Ofuz at the start of the workday.
2. Use the Dashboard tab in Ofuz to see what tasks are due today.
3. While working on each task, attach task notes to record items of interest and time spent on each task.
4. The client, or other project stakeholders, can use the email task dropbox to create new tasks for our freelancer, even if they don’t have an account on Ofuz.com!

The value of Ofuz to our freelancer is that he has a single unified interface to manage both his tasks and the time spent doing them. He can stop using multiple tools to do what really is a single job, and this reduces the Friction Loss of switching tools throughout the workday. In addition, our freelancer’s client feels like they have better access to their freelancer because they can submit new tasks directly to his To Do list.

Let’s take a look at a few key task-management features in Ofuz.

First, you can create new tasks either for a project or for a contact. A task that is attached to a project would be used to organize and track the time for completing that project. Attaching tasks to a project is very easy:

1. Click the Projects tab.
2. In the Add a Project Task box on the left of the page, type a task name in the Task name field.
3. Choose due dates and a category for the task.
4. Click Add this task.

Ofuz also allows you to attach tasks to a contact. Our freelancer would use this feature when he wants to use tasks to track client interactions, or to remind him about actions he needs to take with a certain contact. Attaching tasks to a contact is also very easy:

1. Click the Contacts tab.
2. Click the contact’s name.
3. The contact details page appears.
4. On the left, click add new task.
5. The Add a Task box appears.
6. Fill out the Task description, due date, category, and project fields.
7. Click Add this task.

After creating a number of tasks, Ofuz lets you organize task priorities with a drag and drop interface:

1. Click the Projects tab.
2. Click the name of the project that has tasks you want to prioritize.
3. The project detail page appears.
4. Use the task handle icon (it looks like four short horizontal lines ) to move the tasks into the order you want.

Integrated Timesheets

By not using a separate application to track time, our freelancer spends less of his day on these unbillable chores. As he types in notes on either contacts or tasks, he can easily notate the time spent on each item for future reference. In addition, the Ofuz timesheet feature makes it easy for our freelancer to see time spent by project over any time period.

To track time for a task:

1. Click the Tasks tab.
2. Find the task you want to enter time for (or Add a new task) and then click the comment icon to the right of the task name.
3. The task detail page will appear.
4. In the task note field, type an explanatory note.
5. Below the task comment field, click More Options.
6. In the Hours Worked field, type the number of hours to enter for this task note.
7. Enter any other information you need to, and then click Add this item.

Just like Ofuz has tasks for both Projects and Contacts, it has time tracking for Projects and Contacts. To track time spent interacting with a contact (like a phone call, etc.), our freelancer would:

1. Click the Contacts tab.
2. Click the name of the contact you want to attach a time entry to.
3. In the contact comment field, type an explanatory note.
4. Below the contact comment field, click more options (towards the bottom of the page)
5. In the Hours Worked field, type the number of hours to enter for this contact note.
6. Enter any other information you need to, and then click Add this note.

And to see his timesheet, our freelancer would:

1. From anywhere, click the Dashboard tab.
2. Towards the top of the page, click Timesheet.
3. View the timesheet. If necessary, change the date range at the top of the timesheet page.

The Bottom Line

How has our freelancer reduced his Friction Losses by using Ofuz?

• Our freelancer has reduced time that would be wasted by moving from one application to another by using a single application for unified contact management, task management, file sharing, time tracking, project notation, mailing list management, and client collaboration.
• Our freelancer has increased his client’s understanding of the projects progress by providing his client, co-workers, and sub-contractors with granular updates on project developments. This helps identify problems sooner and enhance communication. These client updates also serve as project documentation, which our freelancer can refer back to at any time.
• Our freelancer has given his client a tighter connection to the project with less effort than using a separate tool for this by creating a client project portal, and allowing his client to use email to assign task to his To Do list

Stay tuned for the next blog post where we will start to look at how a Ofuz helps our freelancer reduce Opportunity Losses!

In the meantime, sign up for a free Ofuz account to see for yourself how it can help you!