Our understanding of time spans thousands of years and multiple civilizations, yet getting the hang of it is still hard. You start your day with a clear action plan and oodles of energy, only to end it with a somehow longer to-do list and a lingering feeling of discontent about your performance.
It’s not just you. Although our collective productivity levels have risen sharply in the 21st century, the faster pace and bigger volume of work also create more cognitive overload.
To cope, you need to get back to the basics by figuring out how to marry your waking hours with the items stacked on your to-do list. That’s exactly what time management apps are for!
What essential features should the best time management app have?
There’s no right or wrong approach to time management. While there are some scientifically-backed time management strategies, they don’t work well for every person or team. Our productivity styles change depending on the environment, type of task, or even time of the day (due to our personal circadian rhythms).
You probably know what hinders your productivity streak—whether lack of clarity, procrastination, or a meeting-heavy day, leaving no time for deep work.
Time management apps help you better understand where your focus lingers and how it impacts your progress with features like:
- Real-time tracking: You’ll identify where you spend most of your energy and optimize efficiency by automating or implementing changes to your policy, like no-meeting Fridays.
- Reporting and analytics: You’ll better understand individual and team dynamics to make more realistic project plans, ensure accurate budget forecasting, and allocate resources more effectively.
- Timesheet reports: You’ll estimate billable hours, process payroll, and ensure compliance with labor laws.
- Integration with other business tools: You’ll sync time tracking with other systems to eliminate manual time entries and create richer app entries without manual copy-pasting.
- Cross-platform support: You’ll access your software easily, whether working at your desk or in the field.
- Great user experience: You’ll quickly feel at ease using your new time management app without it interfering with your workload.
Overview of the best time management apps
Time management is a broad term, including time trackers, task managers, habit-building apps, website blockers, and more. Some products combine several features, while others do just one thing extremely well. When evaluating apps, we focused on:
- Getting organized and staying on schedule
- Building more productive habits
- Promoting goal-setting and reducing stress
To that end, we’ve sifted through a ton of personal recs, social media mentions, and user reviews. We’ve tested each top contender by using it throughout writing this article. In particular, we evaluated:
- Ease of use: Overall user experience and adoption curve
- Features: How the product gets you organized and productive
- Analytics: What insights you can gain about your habits
- Pricing: How much bang you get for your buck (or for free!)
Below are the top tools that can be easily considered as the best time management apps on the market right now:
Best time trackers
| Toggl Track | EverHour | Timely | |
| Best for | Effortless time logging across platforms, apps, projects, and tasks for personal and teamwork | Teams looking to embed time tracking into other digital workplace tools | Automatic time logging of digital desk work |
Best task managers
| Todoist | Akiflow | Routinery | |
| Best for | Anyone looking for a to-do list app for work and play | Busy executives who want to commit time to the right tasks | Neurodiverse people who want to build a productive routine |
Best distraction blockers
| RescueTime | Freedom | |
| Best for | Carving more room for focus work among other activities | Scheduling digital detox sessions during your day |
An in-depth look at the best time management tools
1. Toggl Track
📌 Best for effortless time logging across platforms, apps, projects, and tasks for personal and teamwork.
A lot of popular project management apps let you track tasks but not the time your team members spend on each chore.
Toggl Track brings time tracking into every device, browser, and operating system (OS) workflow. It has over 100 native integrations with popular business apps like Google Calendar, Asana, Notion, Trello, Focused Work, and many more, plus an option to build custom connections with Zapier and Toggl Track API for custom connections (on every plan).
You can power up the timer manually or launch automated tracking based on preset rules like time of day or upon the desktop app launch. The Timeline feature on the desktop app also automatically logs activity in each website and program you view for over 10 seconds. All timeline data on the desktop app is local to your computer—private and inaccessible to other team members or administrators.
Additionally, it supports time blocking, a time management feature that lets you block chunks of time for particular tasks. Linking Toggl Track with your Google Calendar makes it even more seamless because you can convert calendar events to time blocks. Use the built-in Pomodoro timer to remind you about breaks for a more productive streak.
Analytics is another area in which Toggl Track excels. You can visualize your performance in custom dashboards using charts, tables, pivots, bar charts, donut charts, and more. You can also check your efficiency trends week over week to better understand your work habits.
Toggl Track is the best time management app for businesses with trust-based cultures that want to empower people with productivity insights. It’s also a great choice for solos who want to improve their work habits and operational profitability by knowing how much time they spend on different activities.
🌟 Standout features
- Accurate time-tracking on any device and in any app with 100+ native integrations and browser extensions.
- Robust reporting features, providing productivity and profitability insights (templates include Revenue Sources, Client Billing, Project Progress, and more).
- Personal time tracking reminders and automatic time tracking triggers remind you to log hours for active tasks.
- Team time monitoring against project time estimates and alerts about time overruns
⚖️ Pros & cons
| Pros | Cons |
| Lavish forever-free plan for solos and small teams that really ‘sells’ the product’s features | Detects idle time but doesn’t auto-switch off the web tracker after prolonged inactivity |
| Auto-tracker feature on desktop auto-logs your background activity without breaching your privacy | Automated time-tracking reminders are only available on a paid plan |
| Customizable analytics charts and project management templates to maximize the value of your data | Doesn’t offer shift scheduling or shift management features |
💬 Why users love it
Toggl Track clocked over 1,500 glowing reviews on G2.
Dominic King loves how Toggl Track “makes it simple to measure time spent on tasks and projects, establish numerous projects for each customer, add descriptions and tags, and run reports depending on those criteria”.
For Felicity Cameron, a manager at a larger enterprise, Toggl Track is “beneficial for immediately determining where I spend the most of my time and how far I’ve progressed on each project. We utilized the app‘s data to re-evaluate when there were too many projects running concurrently, such as bringing on more partners or modifying my allotted hours”.
Top tip:
👩💻 Personal Take
As a freelance writer, I’ve been using Toggl Track for about two years. While I don’t bill hourly, Toggl Track helps me better understand how much time I spend on different types of assignments to curb inefficiency and avoid over-serving. By knowing how I use my time, I can better plan my work schedule, avoid project overlaps and subsequent panic scrambling to meet unrealistic deadlines.
💰 Pricing
| Free Plan | Free Trial | Paid Plans |
| Unlimited, automated time-tracking | 30 days | From €9/mo per user |
2. EverHour
📌 Best for teams looking to embed time tracking into their digital workplace tools.
Everhour is a time-tracking tool you can integrate into popular workspace software like Asana, ClickUp, and Github or use as a standalone app. In each case, the app will auto-track your time on tasks and log everything into a timesheet.
The benefits? A birds-eye view of project coverage, employee schedules, and joint progress without switching apps. To boot, Everhour also lets you assign hourly rates to every team member for budgeting or easier customer billing. You can set max time limits per different projects, limit editing post-submission, and add other role-specific controls and permissions to streamline team management.
On the downside, time sync and billing features are only available on a paid plan for a minimum of five users. The subscription costs can quickly add up if you’re working with many freelancers, as you’ll have to hook up each with a paid account to avoid manual data entry.
Other than that, Everhour is a great choice for managers looking to gain extra insights into work capacity planning.
🌟 Standout features
- Integration with 40+ popular business apps (Asana, Trello, Basecamp, Clickup, and more!)
- Attractive team timesheets with clock-in, clock-out, breaks, overtime, and time auto-stop
- Configure reusable report templates for time tracking, project milestones, tracking, and sprint reviews
- Mark projects as billable, set a budget, custom task or team member rates, and overspending notifications
⚖️ Pros & cons
| Pros | Cons |
| Unlimited project, task, and time tracking on a free plan | No integrations available in the free plan |
| Seamless time and task sync across projects for easier billing | Mobile app only offers time tracking for shifts |
| Low adoption curve and attractive user interfaces | Pricing can get steep for teams that use a lot of external help |
💬 Why users love it
“If you are an Asana user, get this tool. It will vastly simplify your life!” said Joel, a small business owner. By relying on this integration, Joel no longer has to manually copy-paste data between Asana and Xero to label billable hours and invoice clients properly.
For Florian Menzel, who leads a technical team, analytics dashboards are the key selling point. “The various tables, charts, and other analytical visuals are making it easy to track who is working on what,” making project management a breeze.
Top tip:
👩💻 Personal Take
Everhour is better suited for teams rather than solos, as its paid plan has all those cool cross-product integrations features the company heavily advertises. On a free plan, I couldn’t test those out.
💰 Pricing
| Free Plan | Free Trial | Paid Plans |
| Covers 5 seats and all time-tracking functionality. | 14 days | From $8.50/mo per user with a minimum of 5 seats. |
3. RescueTime
📌 Best for preventing your wandering mind from seeking instant gratification instead of doing focused work.
RescueTime combines time tracking with distraction blocking. By blocking certain apps or websites, you can plan focus sessions and exclude distracting activities. However, the app’s efficiency hinges on your ability to properly categorize different apps as time-killers.
Unlike Toggl Track, RescueTime doesn’t have a web app. To start tracking activity, you’ll need to install a MacOS or Windows desktop app and a browser extension. An Android and iOS app is also available. The RescueTime browser extension updates every three minutes, but it takes a bit longer when you first install the product.
The app uses a new Timesheet AI assistant to automatically label activities by application and categories. Organize all entries on a daily timeline to see how you spend your time. You can also organize all things manually to make an exportable timesheet.
Generally, RescueTime caters more to individuals than teams requiring time tracking. It’s great at shutting down distracting apps and zooming your attention into your task list. However, the analytics feature is rather basic, without any admin view of aggregated user data or the ability to manage, export, or review user reports in the app.
🌟 Standout features
- Customizable Focus Session lengths and settings, allowing you to block different types of apps and sites
- Desktop Assistant that provides at-a-glance information about your focus goals and workday plans
- Dedicated Meetings page, showing all the planned get-togethers from the connected calendar app (supports Google Calendar and Office 365/Outlook Calendar)
- Timesheets AI assistant organizes your time logs on a daily timeline and allocates time across projects
⚖️ Pros & cons
| Pros | Cons |
| Automatic start-up upon powering on the computer | Fewer integrations compared to other popular time-tracking apps. |
| Coaching insights for reclaiming your time and minimizing distractions | On the pricier side, given the number of offered features |
| Meeting alerts with a link to joining the call on supported platforms (Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams) | Doesn’t offer team functionality like admin report views. |
💬 Why users love it
RescueTime scored some brownie points from Geoffrey Turner for “hosted Guided Focus Sessions” and “ease of use”. During a Guides Focus Session, you virtually co-work with other people in Pomodoro-styled sprints.
Xavier Colomés also loves how frictionless RescueTime is: “It is zero [percent] annoying, as they only notify you of really relevant events”.
Top tip:
👩💻 Personal Take
The app interface looks a bit dated. Upon sign-up, you’re immediately prompted to activate a free trial for a premium plan, requiring full billing details. Given there’s a free Lite version, this felt imposing. Otherwise, RescueTime did a good job logging my browser and app activity in the background and blocking access to time-wasting programs.
💰 Pricing
| Free Plan | Free Trial | Paid Plans |
| Available with limited project tracking and calendar sync | Two weeks | From $12/mo per user |
4. Timely
📌 Best for automatically tracking all digital desk and knowledge work.
Timely leans fully into automated time tracking.
Once installed on your Windows, Apple, or Android device, the app starts clocking the minutes on different tasks. Thanks to the Memory feature, there’s no need to start or stop the timer. It detects all your background activity throughout the day—desktop app activity, website switching, and idle time.
Using drag-and-drop features, you can organize all captured activities to create a timesheet.
In terms of privacy, you can set rules to ignore certain activity tracking (e.g., exclude certain websites, apps, or document activity from automatic logging). Or you can change the page, app, or document title for specific activities. For example, to mask a sensitive document title from being saved in the cloud.
Users say Timely is quite precise with automatic data capture, but some goofs do come along with the app mislabeling at task or going blank. On the pro side, the team just added a new notification feature to alert users about time sync issues, plus better activity capture for rapid tab switching (available in beta as of September 2024).
Digital time tracking is Timely’s undeniable advantage, but it falls short of covering other workloads like field, manual, or non-desk labor. So it may not be the best choice for teams with more dynamic or on-the-go responsibilities like those in healthcare, engineering, logistics, or construction.
🌟 Standout features
- Up-to-the-minute auto-generated employee timesheets covering all the digital activities for the day
- Robust in-app search for resurfacing specific tasks, documents, and websites you’ve worked on
- Integrated Project dashboard, combining capacity and budget data for better resource allocation
- Custom tags for labeling all your workflows, tasks, projects, and all other activities.
⚖️ Pros & cons
| Pros | Cons |
| Simple, minimalistic app design with data-rich reporting views | Invoicing a third-party subscription to QuickBooks |
| Easy way to track internal cost rates for budgeting and manage billable hours | Doesn’t properly log incoming calls, messages, and web meetings on mobile phone |
| Frequent product updates, new feature releases, and bug fixes | Chrome only browser extension available |
💬 Why users love it
Timely app gets a lot of praise for its sleek UX and easy learning curve. As Laurence Collings puts it: “I’ve never really bothered with productivity apps because the learning curve has been too much effort versus the potential gain—but this is one of the very few I’ve adopted, effortlessly, and so become a bit of an evangelist for.”
Other users like Lana Potgieter have been thoroughly impressed with the Memory feature and granularity of time tracking: “Integrating the different spaces and tabs I use, and the amount of switching when working with clients was very effective! [It] shows multitasking, and I can see and allocate even short minute blocks of time to a project & client”.
Top tip:
👩💻 Personal Take
I loved how Timely makes it easy to log time and organize entries with pre-suggested tags and sample reporting templates. The Task dashboard is sleek, offering a snapshot view of your schedule. But because there’s no free plan, it’s more suitable for teams than solos.
💰Pricing
| Free Plan | Free Trial | Paid Plans |
| Not available | 14 days | From $9/mo per user |
5. Todoist
📌 Best for anyone looking for an affordable, collaborative upgrade from Notes app to-do lists for work and play.
While not a time tracker, Todoist is arguably the best to-do list app for individuals and smaller teams (under 10 people) who don’t want to bother with more complex and expensive project management tools.
Accessible from any device—desktop, phone, or iPad—Todoist helps you make better use of your time by (auto) planning your schedule. The biggest boon of Todoist is natural language processing. You can describe tasks by typing things like: “Daily standup every Monday at 10 am starting Sep 20 ending Dec 20”, and the app will set up entries for you. Then, you can hash things out further by using priority levels, filters, labels, due dates, fixed or floating times, and more.
Todoist will auto-classify everything and organize your stack into respective projects. The Upcoming tab displays all your pending tasks for the week in a list or Kanban-style board view, and the Today tab shows what you must accomplish here and now. You can also check everything in a Calendar view.
While Todoist doesn’t offer robust analytics, it allows you to track your daily and weekly productivity and stay motivated by setting weekly goals and earning Karma points.
For teamwork, you can share access to your projects with family and friends (even on a free plan). Collaborators can leave comments and get notified when tasks get completed. On a Team plan, you can also assign responsibilities, set more filter views, enjoy a calendar layout, store more project templates, and configure roles and permissions.
Although Todoist does not have time tracking features, it can help you stay more organized by building an effective personal task management system.
🌟 Standout features
- Turn any action item from 80+ apps (Google Calendar, email, Microsoft apps) into a task in several clicks
- Add task descriptions, set reminders, and task filters using human language—and let AI assistant prioritize things from there
- Supported on all major devices (iPhone, Android, wearables, email clients, and browsers)
- Easily share projects and tasks with non-users via public and private links
⚖️ Pros & cons
| Pros | Cons |
| Impeccable, cross-platform user experience with a focus on simplicity and efficiency. | Doesn’t support start dates that hide your tasks until their start date is due |
| Robust natural language processing for quick task entry | Subtasks can show as regular tasks in some views |
| Curated database of swipeable templates for a quick start | No way to set task dependencies without installing an add-on app |
💬 Why users love it
Todoist has a somewhat cult following online, especially on Reddit, where loads of long-term users applaud the app for its “really robust free plan,” “top tier natural language processing,” and “perfect balance between usability & options.”
Atlanta Community Food Bank team, in turn, loves Todoist because “collaboration and task delegation has become an easy pie and working on group projects has been rendered successful through sharing and attaching of task files and documents”.
Top tip:
👩💻 Personal Take
Todoist sits at the sweet spot between a simple to-do list in a Note app and professional task management software. I love that Todoist continues to do what it says on the tin—reducing the chaos of managing an endless string of daily tasks, drawing your attention to where it should be.
💰 Pricing
| Free Plan | Free Trial | Paid Plans |
| Covers 5 personal projects | Not available | Start from $4/mo per user |
6. Akiflow
📌 Best for becoming more conscious of your workload and committing the time to the right tasks.
Similar to Todoist, Akiflow sits more in the universe of productivity apps, rather than time trackers. The app’s features promote the idea of intentional productivity, coaching you to build a better schedule and direct attention to things that matter.
Thanks to integrations with over 3,000 different apps, you can create new tasks by selecting any text or pasting a URL to the Akiflow inbox. From there, the app will help you build a better schedule by aggregating tasks, to-dos, and meetings into a daily to-do or weekly/monthly timeline. You can manually assign specific calendar time slots to every task to time-block or manually add planned work hours.
The lack of integrated time-tracking or a timer means you need to be good at estimating the average task duration to properly assign time blocks and avoid overlaps. The AI assistant will help curb the chaos by organizing all entities by tags, projects, and folders. Plus, you can ask it to auto-assign your daily tasks and break down projects into manageable to-dos.
Unlike many productivity apps, Akiflow doesn’t push you to cross one to-do after another to get that dopamine rush. Instead, it coaches you to direct your energy to action items that matter the most and provides room for reflection.
The Rituals feature encourages you to plan your days in advance, review your performance with basic analytics, and jot down areas for improvement—all helpful to reduce the next-day jitters and feeling of overwhelm after a stressful day.
🌟 Standout features
- AI co-pilot helps with task prioritization and tagging on your timeline
- Automated task imports from popular business products, plus dead simple new task creation using natural language and text pasting
- Drag and drop tasks to create color-coded time blocks and replan undone tasks in one click
- Automatic conflict detection in scheduled meetings and overlapping events
⚖️ Pros & cons
| Pros | Cons |
| Seamless task creation and contextual task linking to build effective daily timelines | Mobile apps (iOS and Android) are being reworked due to performance issues. |
| Loads of automation to replan tasks, block recurrent time slots, and keep your timeline organized | No option to convert planned calendar events into tasks. |
| Share available time slots with others via a booking link, with options for single or recurring slots | No free plan is available, and the monthly plan costs $39/user, with a 44% discount if billed annually. |
💬 Why users love it
Akiflow quickly won some brownie points with busy executives and team managers whose schedules are packed with high-stake action items.
For Francesca Marano, Director of Engineering Learning and Growth at XWP, “Akiflow is Get Things Done on steroids. I can easily manage my to-do items, schedule them, or leave them in the Someday bucket if they are not tied to a deadline. I love that I can see my calendar and my to-do items on one screen so I can also evaluate how many calls I can add to my day based on the items in my backlog”.
Founder Simon Stafferton, in turn, loves Akiflow because “It truly helps me organize my day and feel more in control of my tasks and workload than ever before. It’s amazing how well-designed software can do this!”
Top tip:
👩💻 Personal Take
Although on the pricier side, it’s easy to see why Akiflow gets so many raving reviews. The onboarding sequence guides you through integrating the first few apps (Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook) and gets the first task on your timeline. From there, customization and organization are easy—type in tasks, drag and drop ’em on the Calendar view, and adjust the duration. The task management experience is delightful, but the high price tag (which likely covers the impressive number of native integrations with other products) deters me a bit.
💰 Pricing
| Free Plan | Free Trial | Paid Plans |
| Not available | 7-day | From $19/mo per user |
7. Freedom
📌 Best for going on a digital detox to break the habit of mindless scrolling.
If your favorite flavour of procrastination is going deep into the digital rabbit hole, Freedom can help you quit this pattern by blocking every sweet distraction online.
Depending on how radical you want, you can block certain web, mobile, and desktop apps, websites, or even the entire Internet. Don’t worry; the self-ban is temporary, and you can always adjust the settings to your degree of digital comfort.
You can schedule exclusion sessions for a custom time or set recurring sessions. Since it syncs across multiple platforms, your sessions apply to all your devices. Freedom also lets you create different blocklists depending on what you want.
For example, you can have a work list excluding all news or entertainment websites. The slight problem with Freedom (and other website blocking software) is many websites are dual purpose; for example, you can use LinkedIn to network or as a distraction.
Unlike other time management tools on the list, Freedom doesn’t offer many other productivity features, even on the Team plan.
🌟 Standout features
- Customizable, synchronized distraction blocking across websites, apps, and devices
- Locked Mode prevents you from switching Freedom blocking for a set period
- Session annotation and history help you analyze your work habits
- In-app ambient noises are available to help you focus
⚖️ Pros & cons
| Pros | Cons |
| Airtight digital distraction blocking with no easy way to chicken out | Mono-feature product at a slightly high price point |
| Fast setup and easy app configuration | Very limited analytics for quantifying time savings |
| Schedule recurring deep work sessions in advance to maximize your productivity | Lacks integrations with other products to easily export data |
💬 Why users love it
Educator Wil Davenport loves that Freedom does what it says on the tin: “blocks websites and apps that are distracting to me, across all devices and platforms, so I can stay focused. It does its job very well!”
Software engineer Abhishek A also enjoys how the app “provides many small-small important productivity features like “Focus Sounds” which are helpful background white noises.”
Top tip:
👩💻 Personal Take
Although guilty of occasional aimless swiping, I’m not a firm believer in full-site blocking as the answer to better productivity. If my mind constantly seeks distractions, I try to work on my focus abilities rather than hoping a temporary website block will prevent my attention from fading. But everyone’s different, and it may be a good stopper for you.
💰 Pricing
| Free Plan | Free Trial | Paid Plans |
| Free browser extension with limited features available (Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Opera) | 7 days | From $3.30/mo or a one-time payment of $99.50 Team plans start from $99/mo for 10 to 100 members |
8. Routinery
📌 Best for neurodiverse people who struggle to build and maintain a productive routine.
Most time management and productivity apps don’t work well for neurodiverse folks who are easily susceptible to external stimuli distractions, have time perception difficulties, or struggle to switch between activities.
Routinery champions an alternative time management technique rooted in behavioral science. Instead of shoehorning users into keeping up with the clock or smashing items on the to-do list, the app gently coaches them to create a Routine that works for them.
Routines contain different items you can add in any order and assign for any duration. When you start a Routine, the app shows the first task alongside a countdown timer. It will buzz when you need to move to the next item. If you’re still on it, pause the task or add more time.
Once you’re done, the next scheduled task will appear. You can start it, skip it, or pause it. If you’re stuck, the app will gently nudge you to continue with the current step. When creating a new routine, you can choose which days it affects (weekends vs. weekdays), its total duration, and the frequency of reminders.
Routinely creates a clear task sequence and gradually builds up behavior chains between tasks to combat slog, distraction, and procrastination—the type of issues people with ADHD often face. While it’s not a business app, Routinery deserves a place on this list for its commitment to inclusion.
🌟 Standout features
- Pre-made routines for morning, evening, productivity, and health with preset items
- Text pop-up notifications and voice-reminded to help you stay on track
- In-built, self-activated Pomodoro timer to track your performance
- Daily, weekly, and monthly reports on habit building with feedback
⚖️ Pros & cons
| Pros | Cons |
| Promotes positive, long-lasting behavioral changes via habit stacking | No web app or browser version available |
| Uncluttered, intuitive design that reduces time anxiety | Doesn’t address motivation problems beyond nudges |
| No feature bloating or user flow complexities | Some users report high battery usage |
💬 Why users love it
Routinery is making rounds on ADHD subreddits, where users praise it for the ability to “add just enough extra structure/incentive to change and it’s just making everything easier!” and the option to “add a 1 min or 5 or 10-minute snooze if you’re not done yet (these two features are GLORIOUS and absent from the other apps.”
In the Apple Store, reviewers rave about how the app helped “realize how much time everything will actually take and giving me an ETA of sorts that gets pushed back whenever I take longer on a task is just revolutionary for my severe lack of time concept”.
Top tip:
👩💻 Personal Verdict
As a Millennial adult with a slightly shortened attention span and distraction-seeking brain, I also found Routinery to be a great personal tool for adding simple daily reminders for building positive habits like taking my vitamins, doing exercise breaks, and drinking more water. The calm interface design and a great selection of cute icons make those nudges less abrasive, which many others also appreciate.
💰 Pricing
| Free Plan | Free Trial | Paid Plans |
| Supports 2 free Routines | 7 days | From $3.99/mo |
How to choose the right time management tool
Choosing the right time management can be as hard as picking a new Netflix show to binge-watch—so many options, yet you end up scrolling for hours.
To make a shortlist, figure out your use case first. Do you need a tool for the team or personal productivity? Is it task estimation, prioritization, or resource management where you fall behind? Put this down as a simple statement:
“I want a time management app that helps [me /my team] to [address challenge X, Y, Z] so I can [get a desired result].”
Look into an app that best addresses your biggest challenge with its core features. Then, evaluate whether it can also help with other hurdles. For example, if you want to better understand how much time goes into different team activities, an app with time-tracking features and a team analysis view is a good choice.
Next, consider the app compatibility. You want a product that integrates with your current tech stack i.e., can exchange data with other tools like project management apps, invoicing, or HR software.
Similarly, pay attention to the supported platforms (operating systems, browsers, and devices). If your company has a mix of MacOS and Windows users, you’ll need an app that runs on both. And for non-desk work, you’d also need a companion mobile app.
Top tip:
We also believe it’s helpful to evaluate the cost-benefit of adopting this software. Can better time insights help increase client billing or project budget estimates? Will this knowledge prevent over-serving or project delays, leading to cost creep? What’s the number of productive hours you will be able to reclaim? The best time management tools come with a proven ROI.
Common mistakes to avoid when selecting time management software
To save you even more time on product selection, our Customer Success team has some juicy tips:
- Don’t go after the most feature-rich tool. Some productivity apps have a steep learning curve, and most people have zero time to waste learning new software just to track their time. Pick a tool that excels in one major area (e.g., time tracking or task management) plus integrates well with other business software.
- Don’t pick a time tracker with employee monitoring features like keyboard stroke logs, screen recordings, or access to full browser history. Such a degree of invasiveness backfires. Morale and productivity drop, while quitting intention increases. Half of tech workers would leave their jobs if forced to use an app with video recording or facial recognition to track productivity.
- Don’t ignore security and compliance requirements. Learn how the software company collects, stores, and secures the collected data. A breach on their end could mean your sensitive data ends up on the dark web. Ensure all necessary safeguards are in check to stay safe and compliant.
![30 Time Tracking Best Practices [Individuals, Teams, Managers]](https://toggl.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/time-tracking-practices-everyone-112x67.jpg){kind=tracking}
Manage your time better with Toggl Track
If you struggle to understand where time slips and how to use it more effectively, Toggl Track may have the answers.
Our time tracking platform transforms your ‘busy’ into task-based daily timelines, detailed weekly timesheets, capacity-based project estimates, and client invoices with billable hours.
By combining automated and manual time tracking across 100 apps, we help busy solos and teams discover which high-value activities contribute to their goals the most (all while being hawkish about anti-surveillance and user data protection).
Visualize how you spend your time in custom dashboards to zoom in on your performance, project profitability trends, and resource allocation effectiveness.
Sign up for a free Toggl Track plan to get started.
Elena is a freelance writer, producing journalist-style content that doesn’t leave the reader asking “so what." From the future of work to the latest technology trends, she loves exploring new subjects to produce compelling and culturally relevant narratives for brands. In her corporate life, Elena successfully managed remote freelance teams and coached junior marketers.
