As business begins to improve and things become a bit wild and crazy, it’s important to keep organized as well as streamline your more common business processes. Fortunately, we live in a world of apps… and there are plenty of them to help make our lives a bit easier. Below are five apps I use on a regular basis to keep me sane:

Basecamp

Basecamp comes with an affordable pricing model and tons of “must have” functionality for freelancers. We all love working on that huge, large-budget project that provides some  job security… but unfortunately, we don’t always have those in the queue. If you’re like me, you’ve probably had to manage 5 or more projects at once before, and this is fine… as long as you can balance them all and give your clients the attention they deserve. This is where Basecamp comes in.

Basecamp offers a great messaging system for consolidating, managing, and engaging in dialog with your client. Post mockups, screenshots, screencasts, whatever you’d like… it’s all there. In addition, there are quite a few other features like: to-do lists, milestones, writeboards, chat rooms, email updates, file management, and more.

Skype

Now I’m pretty sure everyone has heard of Skype, so I don’t think I need to elaborate on this much… but Skype is an online messaging service that allows you to make voice/video calls or engage in a chat with other Skype users. Voice calls can also be made to mobile phones and landlines using this service.

We all know, sometimes email just doesn’t cut it. Giving your client the option to phone you and discuss project details (affordably) or even engage in a video conference, offers a level of comfort otherwise not achieved through email. Now, smartphone carriers have opened up Skype on their mobile devices – and you can make free calls using its service. Take advantage of this now… these types of calls won’t be free for long!

Things

Things (for mac only) is a great task management application that is also available for the iPhone and iPad. If you’re like me, you forget everything… which is why I purchased Things. Now when I forget something, I can at least remember who to apologize to.

Though Basecamp does offer to-do lists, Things specializes in them. This application takes task management to a new level. Schedule tasks, manage projects, create to-do’s, sync it with your iPhone… do whatever you need to remember!

Google Reader

Now, we do love Google… but their reader isn’t really anything special. It’s the concept behind these comments that is truly of value.

Freelancers are frequently on the prowl for new work. Everyone has their methods of acquiring new clients – but this one is great. As we know, there are thousands of tech job boards on the web today, some good some not. MOST of them offer RSS feeds that list their job ads. Using Google Reader, you can dump and categorize all of these job ads quite easily and pick and choose whichever jobs interest you most.

Ping FM

I touched on Ping.fm over in the resources section, but I thought I’d discuss it a bit more here.

Spreading the word about your projects, business, specialties (and everything else) is important today. The more positive exposure on the web you have, the better. With more and more cool social media apps launching every day, it’s becoming pretty difficult to stay current and manage all of these accounts effectively. Ping.fm is a great service that can integrate into other third party apps to deliver your latest moves across your social media network. Oh yeah, and it’s FREE.

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