Author: mike-knerr

This FreshBooks Feature Will Cut Your Invoicing Time In Half

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Get Shift Done: Tips and Tricks


Creating custom invoices in FreshBooks can be time-consuming, especially if you sell a wide range of products or services. Fortunately they have a built-in solution that can dramatically reduce the time you spend on future invoices with just a little up-front effort: presets for tasks and items.

Tasks and items (billed hourly and at a fixed price, respectively) are how FreshBooks categorizes line items on its invoices. Adding these manually every time is both time-consuming and irritating, but with presets you can bypass the hassle and get to the good part — getting paid.

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Automatically Populate an Excel 365 Spreadsheet With SurveyMonkey Responses

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Get Shift Done: Tips and Tricks

Data collected on platforms like SurveyMonkey can often be far easier to work with and analyze in an Excel spreadsheet. But manually transferring that data and keeping it up to date can be a huge pain.

Fortunately, Zapier offers a way to automate this process. The quickest way to find the workflow we’re looking for is to enter the apps we want to connect into Zapier’s search bar:


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Make FreshBooks The Bad Guy: Reducing Late Payments Through Automated Reminders

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Get Shift Done: Tips and Tricks


Most of us have had at least one client who never seems to pay their invoices on time. But don’t worry, FreshBooks has your back. The popular accounting solution vendor has volunteered itself to be the scapegoat for late payment reminders, shifting any annoyance your client might have to an automated message — one they’ll start to expect if they don’t make their payments on time.

Best of all, it couldn’t be easier to set up. Simply log into your FreshBooks account, navigate to “Settings:”

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Use This Trello Strategy to Balance Your Short-Term Tasks and Long-Term Goals

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Get Shift Done: Tips and Tricks


Web-based project management platforms like Trello can be awesome for tracking all your tasks. However, without a strategy to rescue you from the tension between short-term tasks and long-term projects, you’re likely to miss your goals.

Using the approach below will help you balance these two types of tasks, especially if they span a wide range of projects, clients, timeframes, and levels of urgency.

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How to Create a “Coming Soon” Page for Your Squarespace Website

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Get Shift Done: Tips and Tricks


Getting your Squarespace site up and running takes time, and while you’re getting it all spiffy, you’re missing out on potential visitors. The solution? A “Coming Soon” or “Under Construction” page that can act as a placeholder until your site is ready for its public debut. Squarespace doesn’t have a specific page type for this, but there’s one we can adapt very easily — the cover page.

Cover pages are designed to be standalone, with no navigation bar to link to any other pages on your site, so you can rest assured that visitors won’t start browsing your incomplete site (though I still recommend disabling your other pages while you work on them, in case someone tries typing /about or /blog into your URL to see what’s there):

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Automatically Sync Your Basecamp Schedule With Your Favorite Calendar App

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Get Shift Done: Tips and Tricks


It’s become pretty crucial to have a well-maintained calendar to track your availability and upcoming responsibilities both at the office and at home. Easier said than done though, especially if you work on multiple teams or projects, each with their own steady stream of things to do. That’s why this Basecamp tips is so useful.

If you use Basecamp 3, you’ll be familiar with the Schedule feature available from within any project:

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Prioritizing Your Trello Tasks Using Labels

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Get Shift Done: Tips and Tricks


Trello may be one of the the best platforms for organizing your tasks, but it has one glaring flaw: no baked-in “priority” indicator for task cards.

While this is an oversight I hope the team fixes in the future, there is a simple workaround — Trello’s “Labels” feature. With labels, you can color code each task and assign unique names to each color. Each board can even have an entirely different set of labels if you want to get that specific. Here’s how:

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Set It and Forget It: FreshBook’s Recurring Invoices Take the Hassle Out of Getting Paid

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Get Shift Done: Tips and Tricks


If you use FreshBooks, you now have a way of cutting out one of the most repetitive tasks associated with getting paid — sending out invoices for recurring work.

That’s right, all you need to do is create one recurring invoice and FreshBooks will send it out as many times and as often as you choose. Here’s how it works:

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