Cushion

For the past year I’ve been trying to get my freelance business off the ground and thanks to Cushion it’s been an awful lot less stressful and terrifying than it might have been otherwise.

Cushion

Cushion is an app for organising a freelancer’s schedule and income. Currently it’s being designed and developed by Jonnie Hallman who’s been writing about his design process, his company’s expenses and all sorts of other musings. Naturally, all of this working in public has been terribly inspiring—as I’ve been using the app on a daily basis and as I read about each new feature or problem I’ve come to appreciate just how difficult it is to make a service like Cushion work behind the scenes.

How has this service helped my business though? Well, I tend towards messiness and disorganisation by nature yet somehow it’s encouraged me to fight all this unruly behaviour. Whenever I load it up in the morning I can get a quick glance at how much is owed to me, what projects I’ve got coming up next and what things I currently have to work on. I’ve been using it in conjunction with Harvest, which records my time, and Trello, which records all the tiny details of the job (such as “fix this broken image” or “style this component”) and so far I’m very happy with the results.

Looking back on the past twelve months I’ve been fortunate enough to work with some wonderfully smart folks such as Good Work, Kind, XOXO, and CSS-Tricks, and even though I’ve worked on projects I would never have dreamed of just a few short months ago, Cushion has been there to help make sense of it all. It’s been sitting in the background quietly doing a single job and doing it well. It’s pushed me to clean up my act, to tidy invoices and other financial ephemera. It’s eased the innate awkwardness of client work and helped make it all just a little less awkward.

I don’t have much of an idea as to what 2016 has in store for me yet, but I’m sure that Cushion will be probably be along for the ride, too.

Hey, if you sign up with this referral link then I get a tiny kickback.