Freelancing while you build something of your own

You have two retainer projects, a proposal to write for a third, and something of your own you started building months ago. Project work carries a deadline someone else set. New business carries a deadline you feel but never write down. Your own product carries none, so it gets whatever is left, which is usually nothing.

By Friday you know it got nothing, and by Friday there is nothing left to trade for it. This is not a discipline problem. The three streams live in three places: project work in an inbox and a shared tracker, new business in your head, your product in a notes file you open on Sunday. Nothing puts them side by side, so nothing shows them competing for the same Tuesday.

Polylane starts with a matrix. Projects are columns, channels are rows, and every pursuit sits on one screen instead of in its own tool.

• Projects — the retainer work, a website build, new business, and your own product. One column each, including the one nobody is chasing you for.
• Channels — the kinds of work that repeat across all of them, such as delivery, calls, writing, and outreach.

Every task lands in a cell, so one screen answers a question you cannot answer today: what is next week actually made of? Nine delivery tasks, one proposal, and an empty column for your product is a fact you can act on before Monday, rather than a feeling you get on Friday.

The default channels are content channels — YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Website. Add your own for how you work. Free includes two custom channels, which covers delivery and outreach.

A proposal is never one task. It is a scoping call, a draft, a follow-up, and a contract to send. Link them into a batch and they move as one.

That earns its keep the moment a project moves. When a review on the second project moves by a week, you move the batch once and the whole chain shifts with it. You see what it lands on straight away, which is often the afternoon you had held for your own product.

Drag a batch onto a day and it takes real time on a real calendar. Every task carries a duration, so a Tuesday holding six hours of project delivery looks full, because it is.

Three views read the same data: Overview for the grid, Timeline for upcoming work, and a Graph view for how the pieces connect. On Solo, scheduled work exports as .ics, so it reaches the calendar you already live in.

Say the grid opens like this. The first project has three days of delivery. The second has a review on Wednesday. The proposal needs two hours before Thursday. That leaves Thursday afternoon, and your product column is empty.

Polylane does not create a fifth day. What changes is that you are looking at this on Monday morning with something still to trade. Give Thursday afternoon to the product, move the proposal, or decide the product waits a week on purpose. Those are three decisions. Finding out on Friday is none of them.

• You quote against a week you can see. When a prospect asks whether you can start Monday, the answer comes from the grid instead of from optimism.
• New business stops being what you do between contracts. Give it a column and it competes for time like everything else, which is the point.
• A moved project deadline shows its cost. You see what the shift displaces before you agree to it, not after.
• Your own product gets scheduled, or gets skipped on purpose. Skipped on purpose is still visible next week. Lost by default is not.

Free covers 2 projects, the default channels plus 2 custom ones, daily calendar scheduling, and task linking. That runs the whole loop across one project and your own product, which is enough to find out whether seeing the grid changes your week. Free stays on one device: no cloud sync and no calendar export.

Another retainer makes three projects, and that is where Solo starts. Solo is $180/yr, paid annually; monthly billing in India is ₹499/mo incl. GST. It unlocks unlimited projects and channels, cloud sync across devices, and .ics export, and it starts with a 14-day trial.

Every paid plan carries a 14-day money-back guarantee, and you can cancel any time. Cancelling deletes nothing — extra projects go read-only and unlock again if you come back. Current prices, currencies, and the founding rate are on the pricing page.

A freelance week puts specific pressure on a planner, so here is what Polylane does not do yet. You would find all of it in week two anyway.

• Calendar sync is not two-way. Your Google or Outlook meetings show as busy time, and on a paid plan the blocks you schedule can be sent to your calendar, but changes made to them there do not come back. We will not describe it as two-way until it is.
• No native app yet. Polylane runs in the browser and installs to your phone's home screen, laid out for a small screen.
• No integrations beyond Google Calendar, Outlook and .ics export. If a customer runs their own tracker, nothing flows across on its own: import a CSV of it, or enter the commitment it represents and plan against that.
• No time tracking and no invoicing. This is a planner. Keep whatever you bill with.
• No AI scheduling. Nothing estimates your week or fills your calendar for you — that is a design choice, not a roadmap gap. The only AI is Brain dump, which turns pasted notes into tasks with your own Claude, OpenAI or Gemini key.
• No per-project permissions. If you subcontract and want a collaborator in the same grid, that is Studio ($120/seat/yr, paid annually, from 2 seats up to 20), and every seat can edit every project. A recipient can see one project through a read-only link, without an account.

Take the seven days you have already committed to. Put your projects, your new business, and your own product on the grid, link what moves together, and drag it onto the days. If your product has nowhere to go, you have learned that before the week starts instead of after it.

Start free — 14 days of Solo, no credit card required. If you would rather ask first whether this fits how you work, email kreativish.ai@gmail.com and a person who works on the product will answer.