Everyone can have great ideas and big plans but the one who has got great time management strategies separate themselves from the pack.
Time is a precious resource. You’ve got 24 hours in a day and so many distractions laid on the table. What do you do and what could you do in these hours make the difference. You can’t have more of it, you can stop it. What you need to have is a way out to estimate and manage time. Time is behind every aspect of running a business, completing a project and you can’t afford to be successful if you manage it poorly.
Whether it’s procrastination, personal distractions, repetitive corrections, or projects that take more time than they should, there will be innumerable things that will waste your time, including rushed deadlines, stressful life, and work-life imbalance. What are the time management techniques you follow in that case? Do you have the time management tools for ultimate time management?
Table of Contents
What is a Time Management App?
Simply put, a time management application is a system that allows both individuals and businesses to track the time of all their team members through a detailed view. This solution helps companies figure out which employee is spending how much time on what task.
The time tracking software is not just limited to tracking time manually or through timers and setting time estimates. You can also use it for payroll, employee attendance, project budgeting, and time reporting.
Let’s understand the benefits of using time tracking software to have a better understanding of how this tool benefits you and your business.
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Here are the 20 best time management apps to help you free up your schedule, find time for your personal life, and focus on getting your work done. Let’s delve straight into it.
20 Must-have time management apps to organize work:
1. ProofHub
ProofHub’s task management feature strives to help you manage your tasks and organize the chaos because of multiple tasks assigned to multiple people. It helps you manage all your tasks and move them through various stages from beginning to end. Whether you’re a team manager or member, the tool becomes one place for all your projects, teams, and communications giving you full control over your tasks.
Why use ProofHub?
- A transparent way to assign tasks
- Create daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly recurring tasks
- Add time estimates, labels, and start and end date in tasks
- Break down tasks into subtasks
- Attach files to the tasks
- Keep the tasks private and limit access to certain people
- Email-in to manage tasks anytime from your email
- Track time using a timer
Is it affordable?
Yes.
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2. Timely
Timely by the timely app is an automatic time tracking app that not only keeps tabs on how long projects take but also helps you organize your workweek more efficiently. Lay out your workweek in advance to estimate how much time you need to set aside to tackle your daily tasks. Timely is available for iOS and Android, Mac and Windows, and as a browser application.
Why Timely?
- Records everything you work on using its magical Memory Tracker
- A more realistic idea of how much time projects eat up
- Timely holds you accountable to the amount of time you set apart from work
- Makes time entries for you recorded work
- Create reports for easy communication your time data
Price: Solo plans for individual users start at $7/month
What users like?
Tracks time automatically without the need for a stop/start button. Even if you’ve forgotten to track your hours, Timely hasn’t. – Alex
3. TSheets
TSheets by QuickBooks is a comprehensive mobile timesheets app to track time on any device for teams of all sizes. Using TSheets, employees can clock in and out quickly and easily from a computer, time clock kiosk, or mobile app.
Why TSheets?
- Build employee schedules by jobs or shifts
- Connect to your favorite accounting or payroll software
- Real-time, interactive reports
- Overtime alerts to stay aware of weekly overtime limits
- Delightfully fast payroll
- GPS location tracking to see where your employees are working
Price: TSheets is free for solo users. It has a Small Business plan that is priced at $4/month per active user (2-99 users) with a $16 base fee per month, and an Enterprise plan at the same rate (100+ users) with $80 base fee.
What users like?
“I have much faster insight into our projects and my team loves to use TSheets for its ease of use!” – Jim Brown, Coil Group
4. Forest App
Want to put down your phone and focus? It is no child’s play to focus on work rather than your smartphone. Forest is an app to reclaim the time and stay in the present, reclaiming your concentration. It is specifically meant to keep you productive. You plant a seed in the forest, you watch it grow into a tree. But if you start using your phone or leave the app, then the plan immediately dies. You get one chance (warning) to save your tree.
Why Forest app?
- Clean, simple, and cute interface
- Graphs to track your progress throughout the week
- Collaborative feature to invite friends and family to join
- Setup is simple
Price: Free. Forest is supported by popular mobile OSs, iOS, and Android, and most common web browsers, like Safari and Chrome.
What users like?
“It’s great because it works like a phone game, but it’s a phone game that gives you time rather than taking it away.” – Forest app review
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5. Harvest
Harvest is a time and expense tracking app that harnesses the power of time tracking to answer essential questions like where is my time going? The app has robust time-tracking features. It is installed with a very smart interface, that is fast and easy to operate.
Why Harvest?
- Track billable time and allow you to instantly create invoices to send to clients for that time
- Update time data on weekly timesheet easily
- Make sure teams have enough time to complete all of your planned projects
- See if projects are on a budget with a glance
Price: Harvest costs $12/user/month (unlimited projects).
What users like?
“In her infinite wisdom, Oprah once said: “You can have it all, just not all at once!’ Harvest forces us to think about time as a finite resource. We’ve become time management superheroes.” – Jan-Sijmen Zwarts, Web Developer, Brighton.
6. Wunderlist
Wunderlist is a wonderfully simple and effective app to manage your online to-do list. This time management software lets users tick off all personal and professional to-dos. Users can track, complete and share their own goals as well as assign tasks for their teams striking a great balance between features and functionality.
Why Wunderlist?
- Share your lists and work collaboratively on a project
- Add notes to make sure all your ideas are stored
- Set due dates and reminders
- Collaborate with colleagues and team members
- Add anything from the web to Wunderlist
Price: Wunderlist Pro – $4.99 a month (unlimited assigning, unlimited files, unlimited subtasks)
What users like?
“There are separate folders for each category. I can even email the lists or print them. You are also notified when other collaborators edit the shared lists.”— Wunderlist review by Mark F.
7. Toggl
Toggl is an app giving hassle-free time tracking to improve productivity. This time tracking software helps users to track time spent on tasks, as well as manually add entries. Keep your entries organized by team, client, project, or tag. If you’re a manager, you can keep everyone’s time in one place.
Why Toggl?
- See who’s spending time doing what
- Delete unwanted entries
- Review your past time to see what’s been dragging you down for extended periods of time.
- Bulk edit your time entries at any time
- With Tags, you can add comments to any time entry
Price: There is a free version, or you can upgrade to a Starter ($9/user/month), Premium ($18/user/month), or an Enterprise account (custom pricing).
What users like?
“The style, the functionality, the absolute ease of use in making sure that every minute of my freelance and contractor work gets tracked and reported so that I can get paid!”— Toggl review by Thomas W.
8. TimeCamp
Comprehensive timesheet app that helps you fill your weekly schedule template automatically. Its unique project structure creates a complex and transparent management system appreciated by teams no matter of size. What is more, TimeCamp offers features such as budgeting, reporting, and invoicing – all to help the teams perform better and deliver work results on time and within the budget.
Why TimeCamp?
- Choose between two types of timesheet templates – daily and weekly,
- Fill your timesheets smarter and in no time with computer activity tracking,
- Approve or reject timesheets,
- Analyze time spent on projects with a wide range of reports,
- Manage time spent on projects smarter with a project tree structure with tags,
- Invite guests to your projects,
- Set different billing rates,
- Manage your employees’ attendance,
- Assign custom user roles.
Price: TimeCamp is free for single users. It also offers two affordable pricing options: Basic – 5.25$ per user per month and Pro – 7.50$ per user per month (both billed annually). For a custom plan, contact their support.
What users like?
“It’s super easy to use, very intuitive and flexible. I started tracking my hours in just a minute of opening the app for the first time. The report feature is great.” – TimeCamp user review
9. Remember the Milk
Ever run to the grocery store for milk and get everything but the milk? Remember The Milk – time management app will help you stay on top of the milk and much more.
Why Remember The Milk?
- Organize multiple task lists
- Enter their tasks on the go with subtasks
- Stay connected even when you’re not online
- Create an unlimited number of lists
- Create to-do lists with colorful tagging options
- Reminders via email, text, IM, Twitter or mobile
Price: There’s a free version available, and paid access starts at $40/year.
What users like?
“I like that I can access my to-do list on any device, every task can have a due date, and I can sort and search through tasks on the list. It’s free.” — Remember the Milk review by Lindsay S
10. RescueTime
As the name suggests, RescueTime saves some of your time to put it to better use. RescueTime gives an accurate picture of how you spend time to become productive every day.
Why RescueTime?
- Spot inefficiencies in your day to better manage time
- Set an alarm to remind when you spend more time on a task
- Set goals per day to stay focused
- Stay informed with weekly email report
Price: RescueTime offers both a free tier and a premium plan which starts at $9/month.
What users like?
“It is an excellent tool to monitor the time we spend on the computer using a program, an application or a web page. It is easy to use because it is only installed on the computer and when the program is subscribed, monitoring begins immediately. According to how it is configured, monitoring reports will be received.”— RescueTime review by Yulimar U.
11. actiTIME
A smart and multifunctional time tracking tool, actiTIME, offers a well-organized system for project planning and progress monitoring. It contains such valuable productivity-boosting features as automatic timers, insightful performance reports, visual estimate tracking, task comments, and more. It provides you with the necessary data to identify any time wasters and boost performance efficiency.
Why actiTIME?
- It lets you track time automatically using the Chrome extension
- It streamlines client billing and invoicing, saving you a ton of time
- It can be easily integrated with other handy apps you like to use
- You can simply switch off any actiTIME features you don’t plan to apply
- You can track task and project progress in the visual format, on the Kanban board
Price: There’s a free version for single users and small teams. Larger teams can enjoy actiTIME for $5-7 per user a month.
What users like?
“Our company needed a simple way of tracking time used on multiple projects – and actiTIME fit the need. Its interface is simple and easy to maintain. We use the application for time management, task estimation and also to communicate deadline information to our team members. Now having actiTIME we can better predict future project requirements!” – actiTIME review by Grob Group
12. Paymo
Paymo is a work management solution with time tracking that helps both creative teams and freelancers deliver projects over their entire life cycle – whether working from the office or remotely.
Why Paymo?
- Lets you add time manually or use the web-timer
- Offers an automatic time tracking option
- Makes billing clients easy and efficient
- Works offline too and syncs with the web app once the Internet is back
- Brings planning, resource scheduling, task management, and team collaboration in one app
Price: Free plan: Paymo is free for solo users. It also has a Small Office plan starting from $9.56/user/month and a Business Plan starting from $15.16/user/month.
What users like?
“We’re constantly challenged to find ways to fit all the work in without sacrificing on quality. Paymo helps us keep our finger on the pulse of project performance.” – Paymo review
13. Clockify
Clockify is one of the most popular, free time tracking and timesheet software for teams. One of the most widely used time management apps, Clockify lets you track work hours across projects, productivity, attendance, and billable hours. You can track the time you spend on various activities, which gives you a deep insight into your time management habits so you can improve your work routine. You can use Clockify from any location, on any device as all data is synced online.
Why Clockify?
- Track time from anywhere
- Unlimited users
- Free forever plan
- Track expenses and invoices
- Works across devices
Price: Free
What users like?
“ I love how Clockify allows my contractors to independently log billable hours.” – Clockify review
14. TimeTree
TimeTree is a shared calendar app that allows you to organize all your events in your calendar. You can share your calendar with your friends, family, and colleagues. This time management app is designed to help you manage your schedules through sharing and communication. Whether it’s your personal calendar, social calendar, or work calendar, you can have them all in one place to access them on the go. Using TimeTree, you can also chat with people you added to your calendars.
Why TimeTree?
- Create calendars for each group of people
- Get the latest news on your own timeline
- Record and share your objectives
- Effortless coordination and collaboration with others
- Synchronize all calendars together
Price: Free
What users like:
“I love this app! You can sync calendars with others and also have calendars just for yourself! I have a calendar connected with my fiancé and two friends, a cleaning calendar, and a calendar of reminders for myself for bills. The best part is that you can choose to look at every calendar all at once or separately.” – TimeTree review
15. DeskTime
DeskTime is an automatic time tracking system for teams and freelancers. You can use this desktop and mobile app for attendance tracking, time tracking, and effective workflow management. This time management application allows businesses to be in complete control over how their employees are spending time every day at work. DeskTime claims to offer best-in-class time tracking and team monitoring features to help you get a clear picture of your team workflow. Integrations with 3rd party apps help you track offline time for an effortless project and task tracking.
Why DeskTime:
- Identify and eliminate inefficient habits
- Manage your team and track projects in one place
- Saves time and monotonous manual work
- Offline time tracking
- URL and App tracking
- Absence calendar
Price: Free plan for a single user. The Paid plan starts from $7/user/month.
What users like:
“ We have been using DeskTime for over a year now. Overall, we are very satisfied with the product. It has improved our team’s productivity.” – DeskTime review
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16. Timing
Timing is considered one of the best time management apps that automatically track which applications, documents, and domains you spend time on. This helps you quickly identify the amount of time you spent on different projects and which non-work-related activities (like games, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) have the worst impact on your productivity. With automatic time tracking of your work, you don’t have to worry about inaccurate timesheets again. You can control the privacy of your time data as no personal times or private details are shared.
Why Timing:
- Automatic time tracking
- Interactive timeline
- Call tracking
- Web app
- Privacy-friendly time tracking
- Reporting
Price: The Paid plan starts from 5.90 Euros/user/month.
What users like:
“ Timing has helped our team reach new productivity peaks like never before. This is a fantastic time management solution for sure.” – Timing review
17. TMetric
TMetric is a free time management app that provides a visual timeline of all your activities throughout the day. Any business can use TMetric to achieve better results as the tool helps them solve various workflow and team management issues. TMetric is not just a time management app but also offers other useful features, like task management, project management, reporting, billing & invoicing, etc., to allow users to have better control over their teams, tasks, and projects. You can view apps and sites you use most frequently during the workday to precisely evaluate your productivity.
Why TMetric:
- Time tracking
- Billing and Invoicing
- Project management
- Team management
- Task management
- Integrations and Apps
- Reporting
Price: The Paid plan starts from $5/month.
What users like:
“ Also supports tracking time in applications for billing and reporting. This is more automated and allows for fine-grained monitoring if that is needed in your business.” – TMetric review
18. ManicTime
ManicTime is a useful time tracking software that allows businesses of all types and sizes to track their employees’ work through automatic tracking and accurate timekeeping. You can download ManicTime on your internal server and install it on several computers. This time management application helps you to organize information regarding computer usage across your company to track what activities your employees are spending their time on, what projects are being worked on, and what websites and applications are being accessed. Also, ManicTime can be integrated into various software applications that your team may already be using.
Why ManicTime:
- Automatic tracking
- Reporting/Analytics
- Accurate timekeeping
- Easy timesheets
- Company-wide reports
- Stopwatch
- Auto-tagging
Price: The paid plan starts at $7/user/month, billed annually
What users like:
“ It helped me track all activities on my computer, and through some post-filtering, I could pull out useful reports.” – ManicTime review
19. Tick
Tick is an advanced time tracking software solution that helps your team run more profitable projects as the tool tracks your time against your budgets. Tick can be used as a web application as well as a mobile application for iOS and Android devices. Users can enter time from anywhere and keep their projects on time and on budget. With Tick, you also get a powerful time reporting tool that generates time reports built around actionable data. You can use this data to bill clients accurately and identify bottlenecks to make adjustments in time.
Why Tick:
- Timecard
- Running timers
- Powerful time reporting
- Instant budget feedback
- Enter time from anywhere
- App integrations
- Easy to use
Price: Pricing is available on quote
What users like:
“Tick has been a crucial find for me that helps me be more effective in my work and keep track of time seamlessly.” – Tick review
20. Focus Booster
Focus Booster is a simple and affordable time management app that helps you stay focused, avoid distractions, and track your time to improve productivity. This app uses the Pomodoro technique that segments your work sessions into manageable 25-minute intervals. Maintain a fine work-life balance by doing your work in short bursts while taking frequent breaks. Digital Pomodoro sessions are automatically recorded so you can review your output to improve productivity or track client work. Focus Booster makes you more accountable and provides insight into how much time you dedicate to your goals.
Why Focus Booster:
- Resist distractions and improve focus
- Dashboard reports
- Healthy work-life balance
- Manual time entries
- Session replay
- Notification reminders
- Label management
Price: The Paid plan starts from $4.99 per month.
What users like:
“ As an easily distracted person, I need focus booster to maintain my focus on tasks, as well as keep track of the time spent on those tasks or clients.” – Focus Booster review
21. Time Doctor
Time Doctor helps you accurately track where your remote teams are spending their time and make sure they are working efficiently. This app tracks the total time your team members work as well as give a breakdown of how much time they spend on certain projects, tasks, and clients.
Why Time Doctor?
- Daily and weekly reports with hours, websites and application usage, task and client breakdowns
- Track time spent away from the computer
- Pop up alerts if you sit idle for long
- Automatically calculate payroll, based on either fixed salaries or on hours tracked with Time Doctor
Price: $9.99 / user per month. Free for 14 days.
What users like?
“By using Time Doctor, we were able to increase our profitability by 30%” – Nik Kree
Hopefully, I’ve helped you narrow down the list of the top time management apps. Now, it’s your turn to try out the apps you think will work for you.
Looking for a time management app for iOS and Android devices? Try ProofHub for free.
5 Benefits of The Best Time Management Apps
Some people would say people can be disciplined and ace time management without using the best time management apps. Yes, it is true, but we’re not talking about individuals here.
The focus is on businesses and their teams here. You might be able to keep track of your time but what will you do when managing a team of fifty people and recording their time data?
Can you do all of this manually? Do you have that much time to monitor and record every team member’s time data?
I can visualize you are already feeling overwhelmed about performing such an arduous task. That’s why you need to use an efficient and reliable time management application to utilize all your resources to the fullest. Using time management software can help businesses save valuable time as your teams can get more done in less time.
Let’s look at five benefits of time management applications that are too good to be ignored.
Encourages job accountability
This is one of the main benefits of using top-rated time management apps – making employees more responsible, disciplined, and punctual for their actions at the workplace. When people know that their work time is being closely measured and monitored, they are more likely to be more productive. They are less likely to waste time gossiping and browsing social media because they’ll be held accountable for the quantity and quality of work delivered by them.
For example, when you don’t use a time management app, some employees can spend more time on coffee breaks and less time doing work. Such people tend to blame others for their carelessness and ignorance when they are questioned about poor productivity. On the other hand, you can track how much time your employees spend on tasks and projects when using a good time management application.
Assigned tasks are likely to be completed on time
Using good time management apps, team managers can set time estimates for tasks to define how much time it should take to get the work done. Setting time estimates also motivates employees to work harder and finish tasks within the specified timeframe. In other words, setting time estimates is like putting a goal for assigned people, which drives them towards achieving the set target to feel accomplished.
You can also set start and due dates for tasks to add clarity as employees know when to begin working on a particular task and deliver it by a specific date. As employees become more conscious of time tracking, they are likely to devote more time and effort to finish the pending tasks rather than devoting excessive time to a single task.
Provides real-time analytics
Your time management app collects and organizes all the time data of individuals and teams to you in one place. You can use this data to measure the time and productivity of every team member. Real-time analytics provide you with a clear and detailed view of the staff attendance, clocked working hours, the number of tasks completed or pending, and time reports of individuals and projects.
Having all your time data in one place makes it easy for managers and business owners to visualize whether their resources are utilized to their potential or not. It also helps them to identify and fix bottlenecks in business processes and make well-informed decisions in the larger interest of their business and everyone involved.
Evaluate team workflow
Time tracking software is not just designed to record how much time you spend on performing various tasks. These days, time management apps offer a multitude of features to allow users to manage various aspects of their work without switching apps.
One of the benefits of using such an application is that you can closely monitor all the meetings, tasks, projects, and client interactions.
This further enables users to analyze the team workflow and identify bottlenecks. For example, a team manager defines a time estimate for a particular task to be of two hours, but the assignee took three hours to complete it. What is the cause of such a delay? Is it due to the low efficiency of an employee or due to lack of resources at their disposal?
Accurate client billing
It’s rare that two different tasks would take the same amount of time for completion. There are times when you have to spend more time on some tasks to ensure optimal quality of the work done. However, not all clients understand this. They would not easily pay you more money than you had earlier agreed upon. Clients might think that you are giving vague excuses to get paid more. That’s when the best time management apps prove handy.
An employee time tracking application enables you to record billable hours so that clients can have factual proof in the form of timesheets. This makes it easy to invoice clients and convince them that they are billed for the amount of time that their work was done.
Methodology
All twenty time management apps listed in the article offer you a fine combination of rich features, high functionality, ease of use, and affordable pricing. We have chosen these applications after carefully evaluating a plethora of time management software available today. We have gone through user reviews, the quality and promptness of customer support, and even used some of them to check their efficiency.
The listed time management apps can be used by businesses and individuals alike. We hope that this article will help you make an informed decision while choosing the right time management app for your business.
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FAQs
What is the best app for time management?
Some top-rated time management apps are listed below. ProofHub – Project Management software with powerful inbuilt time tracking software Rescue Time Focus Booster Remember The Milk Time Camp Forest App
Which is the best time tracking software for project teams?
ProofHub offers a powerful inbuilt time tracking software for project teams of all sizes. You can ace time management in short time with this tool.
Which is the most affordable yet powerful time tracking application?
ProofHub offers simple, fixed pricing plans, which make it a pocket-friendly time tracking software for small businesses and teams with a limited budget.