20 Powerful Time Management Tools
Tools 22 Comments
Time tracking is very important when it comes to designing. You need to know exactly the amount of time you have spent working, and get paid the exact amount you deserve. Many times graphic designers and freelances just roundup the hours they worked, but not any more. The tools we have listed below are very useful, and are destined to help any working designer keep track of time.
1. Getharvest
Track time, log expenses, invoice clients, keep track of account receivables and revenue. Harvest lets you do it all, so you can run your business with style and ease.
2. Toggl
Toggl is designed for effortless time tracking. You can easily capture fragmented worktime. Switching a task or creating a new one is as simple as one mouseclick.
3. Myclientspot
ClientSpot is a Web-based service designed specifically for freelancers, virtual professionals, and small businesses with remote teams to collaborate on projects. ClientSpot brings together all the pieces of your client and team interactions, from project and task management to file sharing, time tracking, and calendaring.
4. Timeiq
Time IQ is the leading web-based time tracking application for agencies, design studios, freelancers and any service based businesses that need to track project time for their clients.
5. Tickspot
In the service industry your hours are your inventory. Lose track of them—they spoil. Hit your budgets—move more inventory. Tick gives you the information you need, when you need it. Nail your mark, every time.
6. Time59
Time59 is time and billing software that runs in your web browser. It keeps track of your hours, generates client invoices, records payments, and maintains client balances. You can access your Time59 account from any computer with a web browser, as well as many mobile devices. Getting started is easy. No installation is required.
7. Slimtimer (free)
From the SLIMTIMER you can create tasks and even share them with your coworkers and those you report to. Open the SLIMTIMER and click on a task to start the clock and click again when you’re finished. If you’ve completed the task click the checkbox to mark it off. Close the browser when you’re done. Run reports of not only your time but also that of your coworkers and reportees.
8. Rescuetime
RescueTime is a web-based time management and analytics tool for knowledge workers who want to be more efficient and productive.
9. Paymo
Have you or your business ever “approximated” the amount of time allocated to projects when billing clients – yet you always seem to work for more hours than you are paid? Has a project ever gotten “out-of-hand” costing far more hours than you originally budgeted? You need Paymo!
10. Makesometime (free*)
MakeSomeTime helps you keep track of your time & invoices like a pro.
11. Klok (free)
Your time is your product. Every minute you spend working that goes unaccounted for is like giving away your product for free. Tracking your time accurately is essential to staying profitable.
12. Mite
Mite is a sleek online time tracking tool. Built in collaboration with the people who rely on it now: designers, developers, architects, and attorneys. Freelancers as well as small teams.
13. 1timetracking
1time is a web-based time and expense tracking application that allows you to easily keep track of the real cost of a project for cost analysis on fix cost or billing after.
14. Motismo
Motismo is a simple, no fluff, time tracking and invoicingsolution for creative professionals. It has been designed for both freelancers and small businesses to provide a bit more organization and management than the usual Post-it system.
15. Tracking-time
Tracking time works as an online web-based application, you can view and track from anywhere at anytime. It’s simple: create a project, create the tasks for that project and start analyzing!
16. Online-stopwatch.chronme (free)
Extremely simple start and stop time tracking.
17. Trackmypeople
TrackMyPeople is a free web-based time tracking service that will save you money and time while providing you with a clear overview of the time your (and your employees) spent on projects.
18. Letsfreckle
Freckle helps you see the big picture: which days have you been working? How much, and on what? Is all that time billable time? What are your teammates and employees doing?
19. Timecamp
Time management is one of the factors of success. Important element of management is monitoring and controlling the resources also the time. TimeCamp was created to better understand how working hours are used and to learn to manage time better. After installing TimeCamp within company each employee will recognize how manages own time, how he could be more effective, in what area to put more effort.
20. Livetimer
LiveTimer is a flexible and easy to use online time tracking service. It can be used by anyone on the Internet to track time for billing purposes or to improve accountability and productivity. Because LiveTimer runs in your web browser, there is nothing to install or maintain.
We hope you will find these time management tools useful. We would love to hear your feedback regarding this article, so please comment below! For more useful articles like this please don’t forget to subscribe to the RSS-feed and follow Inspirationfeed on Twitter + Facebook ! If you enjoyed the following article we humbly ask you to comment, and help us spread the word!
Get yourself professional quality 
Great list! Bill4Time.com is a good time tracking, light accounting, and invoicing software too!
Another great tool for project and time tracking is SantexQ. It’s very straightforward, easy to use and affordable. It also has billing features built in so you can create invoices based on the time you log for each project. Great list! Will have to look at these ones too
My favorite time tracking software is TSheets. It’s web based and is really flexible, I can track my time through a text message. It also has scheduling, invoicing and QB integration.
Great list! Bill4Time.com is a good time tracking, light accounting, and invoicing software too!
Another great tool for project and time tracking is SantexQ. It’s very straightforward, easy to use and affordable. It also has billing features built in so you can create invoices based on the time you log for each project. Great list! Will have to look at these ones too
This a great post! You have all the tools here for different kinds of requirements. Thanks.
Great list. I use Fanurio time tracking software which has helped me really maximize the money i SHOULD be making anyway. Feel free to read the article on my site by clicking the link.
Cheers.
Great article..nicely written with useful tips..thanks..
These tools are very useful for freelancers. I’d like to use Flock. But I’ll try some other free tools in this list. Thanks for sharing.
Keep posting stuff like this i really like it
We’re biased because we develop it, but we’d like to suggest adding Qlockwork to the list. It’s one for the PC users out there – if you’re using Outlook, Qlockwork is the easiest way to track your activities and report your time.
My personal favorite is toggle because of its clean and easy interface, but however I recommend to give a try to paymo.biz. Not only because it’s (mostly) a Hungarian development
but it has a lot of features for free that are payed in other solutions.
The best one I know and the most complete is clockingit.com and is free!! Is the one I actually use at work, it has everything: clients, projects, tasks, sub-tasks, gantt, calendar, reports, users, chat, forum, permissions, opensource code, etc. High recomend!! =)
I would propose http://mrticktock.com – simple and intuitive time tracker with the agile spirit.
If you’d like a tool for managing your time and projects, you can use this web-application inspired by David Allen’s GTD:
http://www.Gtdagenda.com
You can use it to manage and prioritize your goals, projects and tasks, set next actions and contexts, use checklists, schedules and a calendar.
Syncs with Evernote, and also comes with mobile-web, Android and iPhone apps.
A Great article. It can be difficult to choose which is best as they all have their strengths and weaknesses. Luckily the majority of them have trial versions so you can get a feel for them first.
Activity Tracker Plus is another free web-based to-do list and time tracking tool that uses Google Spreadsheet to store data
Hi,
Good extensive list! We have recently released our app Yanomo.com which you might also like to consider. We have completely developed it around a simple online calendar where you can plan tasks and write time from one place. Since we developed it ourselves I will leave rating it to others but feel free to have a look.
- Time tracking
- Flexible rates per user/client/project
- Task scheduling
- Google calendar and iCal sync
- Accurate progress estimation though “Team sourcing”
- Project budgets, estimates and timelines
- Reporting by user, client, project, phase and task
- Every report exportable to csv
- It’s free for small companies up to 3 users (unlimited projects) and for 8 EUR/user/month you’ll get invoicing with it as well.
Kind regards,
Joost Schouten
Yanomo – Time tracking and Invoicing
I discovered Babker.com the other day through Twitter, it’s still in Beta but it cuts down on time when you’re scheduling people, employees, etc. I’ve been interviewing new teachers and I tested my recruiting process on Babker, it arranged all my interviews automatically for me… good stuff…
For tracking time of freelancers, virtual assistants or remote workers, please take a look at Worksnaps (http://www.worksnaps.net). It not only tracks time but also captures work activities so that the logged time is visually verifiable. That makes time tracking for remote work free of guess work. Highly recommended if you have remote workers or freelancers in the team and you are paying them on an hourly basis.
Another one for Toggl. Simple, functional.
Thanks for putting together the list! Another software I would recommend checking out is the Replicon Time tracking software, which has a user-friendly interface and pretty much affordable. http://www.replicon.com/time-tracking-software.aspx