Top 10 Best Time Management Software Vendors

Time management is the art of knowing exactly how you are spending your time. Wasting time is an art we are all very, very good at: people have been wasting time for years, and they only seem to get better at it as time goes by.

I believe that overall absolute productivity hasn’t actually increased very much with the advent of technology: before computers came by, it was much harder to waste time while at work. There were still techniques, some of them quite advanced (does anybody remember the days where desks were kept full of paperwork on purpose, so that workers looked “busy”?). However, it was easy to tell who was working and who wasn’t if you looked carefully enough.

When computers became widespread in offices, things changed: even before the Internet became a reality, it was hard to tell whether a secretary was typing a letter or playing solitaire (again: does anybody remember that? I like to think about it as the precursor of instant messenger). A person looking intently at a computer screen was surely working surely!

Then the Internet came along, and that’s where time started really leaking out of people’s productivity: suddenly there was a huge range of activities which went from watching YouTube (no audio, unfortunately, unless you had a sneaky skin colored earphone!) to browsing the Internet or chatting with friends.

Fortunately, along with a virtual (hidden) playground, the Internet also brought some important tools to keep your time in check (and hopefully balance out the amount of time wasted because if the Internet).

Time management online

Managing time is one of those activities that, even though is done online, is not aimed at leaching out even more time from people’s productive days. In simple terms, time management software will allow you to log what you are doing, and when you are doing it.

This alone is, at least in theory, enough to put an end to most of anybody’s time wasting issues. As we all know, a theory is a theory, and it hardly works in practice: there are many catches to time management. Especially:

If working in a team, time sheets should be shared;
In some cases, team members will need to log time onto the same activity;
Time should be marked as “billable” or “not billable”, in order to know what’s making you money and what’s not;
Time should be logged against a specific task, a project, or a contact;

Basically, by reading what I just wrote, it’s clear that time management software needs to be placed in a context where you also manage your company’s activities as a whole (or, your own activities as a whole: the same principles will happily apply to a home business, or your own private life).

Project, customer and time management together?

So, maybe rather than looking for a time management solution that allows you to have your own personalized timesheet (or, your company-wide timesheet), you should look for a solution that does the lot for you: project management, customer/contact management, and time management (which is to be placed on top of them).

This will allow you to keep track of where time actually goes in a context of a project (that is, a bunch of people working together in order to achieve something) or in the context of a contact (time logged against a specific person).

Let’s see these two cases in more detail.

Logging time against a project

A project involves several people working towards a common goal. A project is broken up into tasks, which are then often grouped in bunches called “task lists”. A task can be assigned to a specific person, or to the group in general (or, “anyone”); some systems allow users to assign a task to multiple people, although that brings in a complexity that some like to avoid. In the context of project management, it’s really important to know, during the completion of the project, who is spending time on what on a daily basis.

If you are billing by the time spent on things, then this information will allow you to bill people at the end of each month. If you work on a per-completion basis, this information will let you know how well the team is performing in terms of productivity. Time can generally be logged against a specific task, or against the project as a whole. While logging time towards the project will give you less granularity in terms of how your team has spent their time, sometimes it’s unavoidable.

Logging time against a contact

Some companies don’t have projects at all: think about a company that provides phone support to their customers. They want to have a list of contacts (customers, and then be able to log time against those people directly. In terms of billing, what I wrote above in terms of logging still applies: you might bill your customers according to how much time was spent on them, or simply to see how demanding some customers are being.

Some systems also allow you to create tasks against contacts, and then log time against those tasks. This is, again, another way to categorize the time you spend on your contacts.

So, how do you and your team waste your time?

The Internet has changed the way we work in a very deep level. While it’s much easier to “fake” work, it’s much harder to lie in a timesheet — especially if the results of your team’s work are expected to have a pre-defined ration.

Time management is important in order to keep track of everything and bill customers fairly. It’s also a way to measure your company’s slack and efficiency, and keep track of what customers are getting for their money.

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Top 10 Best Time Management Software and Apps Vendors:

TOGGL

Best time tracking system for a small business. A simple online timer with a powerful timesheet calculator. Syncs with iOS & Android app.

TOGGL

TIMECAMP

Time tracker with computer activities and productivity monitoring, attendance tracking, integrations and more…

TIMECAMP

MYHOURS

My Hours is a Time Tracking service you will actually keep using. Organize yourself and your team. Bill your clients, run a business.

MYHOURS

TSHEETS

TSheets is employee time tracking and scheduling software that’s accurate to the second. Easily track time from anywhere, on any device, to see employee GPS location, simplify payroll, create and send accurate invoices, and save thousands on payroll costs each year. Try it free!