My Favorite Time Tracking Apps and Tools

The first step to improving your productivity is to track your time.

The mere act of tracking is likely to improve your productivity; you’ll think twice about playing that game of solitaire when you have to log it. It’s the same principle Weight Watcher’s uses when they have you keep a food journal to track your points. Whenever you start to gain weight, it’s usually because you have stopped tracking.

Tracking your time is tedious.

The data is priceless, however, so it’s a good idea to track for 1-2 weeks every year. You’ll be amazed at the patterns you’ll see – and it is the quickest way I know to find the time vampires that are sucking your energy – and profits! – away. That’s why it I require it of all my coaching clients – using the data from time tracking lets us get to work right away and make progress much faster.

I used to have my clients keep a paper time log. Easy to use, but it took time to collate the data so you could see total time spent on particular tasks. Then one of my clients created a spreadsheet to collect time tracking data. Easier to sort time spent on tasks, but a little clunkier to use.

Now there are some great time tracking apps and tools.

Here are four of my favorites. Each is simple to use (I named my company Your Chief Simplicity Officer for a reason!), free (or very low cost) and each is useful for a particular purpose.

Rescue Time

Tracks where you spend your time on your computer. Once installed, runs in the background and can be set to send you a weekly report. The beauty is you don’t need to turn it off and on – it automatically tracks your time. Only tracks time actively spent in a program; no worries if you leave a program open on your computer all day, but only use it occasionally. Great for tracking time spent on email and social media.
ATracker time tracking app screenshot

ATracker

My new favorite. This app lets you track your whole life by tapping on your phone to start or stop each activity. It then produces reports on your day, and beautiful piecharts of how you spent your time. Apple only. You will need the paid version (a very reasonable $2.99), as the free version only allows you to track 4 tasks. Worth testing the free version to see if you like it. Con is that you must remember to touch the task to start and stop the tracker. Which is why I also recommend using:

Your SmartPhone Stopwatch

Just set it to ring every 15 minutes (or bark, in my case.) That becomes a backup to remind you to start (or stop) ATracker.

Toggl

My VA uses this app to keep track of the time she spends on my account. I’ve been using it to keep track of the time I have been spending on volunteer work for a professional organization. Works on both Macs and PC’s and there is a SmartPhone App too. Not quite as easy as Atracker, but nice that it works across platforms and syncs with your smartphone. Hint: it is important to track volunteer time so you can set some limits if it starts taking too much of your time.

I challenge you to start using one of these time tracking apps. Then share what you found most surprising as a comment below this post.

Comments

  1. Hi, thank you for explaining about the time tracking software I agree with your point that The mere act of tracking is likely to improve your productivity. I want to add one more software for time tracking is scopidea I personally using this easy to use no external knowledge required and the best part is it is cloud base so you can access from anywhere or you can work for home and track your working time.

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