(This tip is brought to you by the Creativity Studio Circle on the Behance Network)

Balancing working from a home studio has been a learning curve, to say the least. Unlike my other jobs, there were no systems in place to help manage the day-to-day needs beyond designing. All the work-flows and tools had to be developed from scratch (project management, digital asset organization, scheduling, billing, creating proposals, marketing, finding new leads, server hosting, email, etc... )

Below is a list of software (Apple) that makes my work.... work. The list is comprised of tools beyond the standard designing/coding/developing software from Adobe, Apple, etc. Feel free to add your additional 'knowledge' below.

1) Billings (http://www.marketcircle.com):

Billings combines powerful features with stylish designs so you can send elegant invoices right out of the box. Choose from any of the customizable templates, or create your own with the built-in WYSIWYG designer. Either way you'll send polished professional invoices in seconds, without expensive and time consuming graphics software.

2) BaseCamp (http://www.basecamphq.com)

Basecamp takes a fresh, novel approach to project collaboration. Projects don't fail from a lack of charts, graphs, stats, or reports, they fail from a lack of clear communication. Basecamp solves this problem by providing tools tailored to improve the communication between people working together on a project.

3) DayLite (http://www.marketcircle.com)

Daylite works at the center of your business, helping you stay on track and deliver on time. From shared calendars to simple projects, to contact management to email integration, Daylite keeps you organized and frees your mind of clutter. Get Daylite, worry less and spend time doing what you do best.

4) Behance (http://www.behance.net)

Nuf Said... great network - we all know that

5) Parallels (http://www.parallels.com)

Run Windows, Linux, and more side-by-side with Mac OS X on any Intel-powered Mac, without rebooting. With Parallels’ virtualization technology, you can run Mac OS X and Windows at the same time. You can even drag-and-drop files between desktops. Great tool when you need to jump back to Windows, and yes it happens.

6) NetNewsWire (http://www.newsgator.com)

Great tool for an easy-to-use RSS and Atom reader for your Mac. On the Mac, this is my favorite. I use it to keep up with my industry news, craigslist postings in my area, and more.

7) Coda (http://www.panic.com/coda)

So, we code web sites by hand. And one day, it hit us: our web workflow was wonky. We’d have our text editor open, with a FTP software open to save files to the server. We’d be previewing in Safari, running queries in Terminal, using a CSS editor, and reading references on the web. “This could be easier,” we realized. “And much cooler.”

8) Transmit (http://www.panic.com/coda)

Great FTP solution and more. It has some great features to make your life much easier.