Today, I want to share with you 3 really simple to-do list apps that freelancers can use. If you are a more experienced freelancer or you’re juggling a lot of clients/projects, you may want to consider using something a little bit more robust, like Trello or Asana. The to-do list apps I am sharing with you today are more simple. To-do list apps are basic tools you need to have in your toolkit as a freelancer. You will need to keep track of projects that are coming in from clients and make sure that you document them somewhere so that itâs easy for you to avoid dropping the ball, missing deadlines, making mistakes on projects, etc. These particular apps are 3 of my affordable favorites.
CLARO
The first to-do list app I want to share is CLARO. This app is about $5 a month. It has an awesome feature called an âinboxâ where you can write reminder messages and 
drag that message to any particular day. On your to-do list, you can drag tasks/items over to different days and they will keep rolling over if you don’t check them off. When you do check them off, you can leave the task/item there or you can delete it completely from your mainframe. It’s also really easy to add tasks to your list. CLARO is great for sorting items by the priority in which they need completed. This app provides a really simple user experience. You can see exactly what is coming up on your schedule. There are a lot of shortcuts that you can use, you can change things within the settings, and you’ll always see what’s immediately in front of you. This is helpful if you’re working in the beginning or middle of the week – you can see what’s coming up. There is also a good chance for you to see if you are overloaded on a particular day.
To-Do
Similar to that program is To-Do, which is cheaper (around $3 a month or $24/year). I like that you can see more days than just the four-day view with CLARO – you can get a really decent snapshot of your whole week. To-Do is similar to CLARO in that you can drag and drop items/tasks. You can also change the settings to have different colors for your background & text. One great feature is that you can hop ahead to add items/tasks to dates in the future. You can break projects down into a couple of different steps and drop those tasks on different days. Personally, I would keep it up during the day and as I would talk to a client, I would drop that task in there to make sure that I didn’t forget about it. You can delete items entirely and un-delete them if needed. CLARO is a step up where you get that inbox feature, but again, I used To-Do for many years at $24 a year – it’s totally affordable and really easy to keep things going.
TickTick
One level up is an app that is slightly more complicated but still underneath the complexity of Trello or Asana – a tool called TickTick. As far as the
pricing, their annual plan is only a little bit more expensive than To-Do – it’s around $28 a year which is very fair. There’s a lot more functionality within a TickTick account because you can add various things to your individual. I haven’t used this app much because I found it to be a little more complicated than what I needed. The nice thing about TickTick is that you can add more features than you could in To-Do or CLARO. You can add priority levels, you can assign dates, etc. If you need something that’s a step up from CLARO and To-Do, you can duplicate items, pin items, & add subtasks. You can click on the left bar and see what you have coming up today and what’s coming up in the next seven days. You can rearrange items or move the date. This is a really nice middle ground to be able to achieve what you’re looking for, compared to more in-depth programs such as Trello. All of these programs are relatively affordable. CLARO is actually one of the more expensive ones at $5 a month although you may be able to get an annual subscription discount. It’s really up to you what app resonates with you but the good news is you don’t have to spend a lot in order to get a good to-do list program or app. These are all great to make sure that you’re not missing any deadlines or losing track of any open projects with clients.