You’ve heard about time management techniques, but how do you improve your time management skills? For most people, a time audit is the perfect place to start. A time audit involves tracking how you spend your time, identifying areas for improvement, and creating a plan to optimize your efficiency. While this sounds simple enough, manually doing a time audit can be tedious. Thankfully, time audit apps can do the heavy lifting for you. In this article, we’ll explore how to do a time audit, the benefits of using a time audit app, and the best time audit apps to help you track your time to get back to what matters most.
Tackle’s automatic time tracking software is a valuable tool to help you achieve your goals, like finding the best AI time tracking apps for logging employee hours. Tackle’s app automatically tracks time and projects in the background so you can focus on the work.
13 Best Time Audit Apps for Tracking & Managing Your Time
1. Tackle: Streamlined Automatic Time Tracking
Tackle revolutionizes time tracking through seamless calendar integration, eliminating the need for manual logging. Our platform automatically captures and categorizes your time, providing actionable insights through intuitive dashboards and reports.
We’ve built everything you need into one seamless package:
- An intelligent tagging system that works your way
- AI-powered automation to handle the tedious stuff
- Flexible reporting tools to track what matters
- Intelligent time capture right in your browser
Trusted by Roblox, Deel, and Lightspeed Ventures teams, Tackle helps executives, team leaders, and customer-facing professionals understand and optimize their time allocation. Simply connect your Google or Outlook calendar, set up custom tags and automations, and gain valuable insights into how your team spends their time.
Whether you’re tracking strategic initiatives, measuring team efficiency, or ensuring resource optimization, Tackle transforms time monitoring from a chore into a powerful decision-making tool.
Start using our automatic time-tracking software for free with one click today!
2. Buddy Punch
Buddy Punch is a simple app for tracking work hours, ideal for small to medium-sized businesses. This simple, effective, intuitive time tracking platform offers a time tracking option, automatic overtime calculations, and reports ready for payroll. Buddy Punch calculates gross earnings by filling in an hourly rate.
3. Connecteam
With Connect Team, you will manage your employees with one solution because its goal is an all-in-one employee management platform. It is a time-tracking app that allows managers to put their business processes on autopilot and focus on business growth while freeing employees to be more productive. This app for tracking work hours will enable you to manage your employees from one place.
4. Paymo
If you want to manage tasks, create team schedules, track work time, and bill your clients from the same platform, Paymo is ideal for you. Paymo is a work and project solution dedicated to Design, Architecture, Law Firms, and Consulting businesses.
5. Monday.com
With monday.com, you can know how much time is spent on each project and task and create flexible reports. Monday.com is a cloud-based Work OS, where teams create workflow applications in minutes to run their processes, projects, and day-to-day business.
It is designed for sales, marketing, and project management.
6. Workpuls
Available in the cloud or on-site, WorkPulse scales up to support the size of your workforce.
It is built from the ground up with the latest security and privacy standards at the enterprise level. With the help of this app, you can optimize the performance of your teams – especially in today’s remote-working world.
7. DeskTime
DeskTime is a fully automated tracking solution that primarily tracks the productivity of freelance workers, small or medium businesses, and collaborating teams.
DeskTime’s performance monitoring extends to configuring daily reports via email, while an online summary of employee activity is available at any time. It also tracks resource usage across all your devices, significantly increasing your productivity and minimizing business losses caused by a lack of organization or less-than-optimally planned schedules.
8. Homebase
This tool helps businesses manage team communication, productivity, employee scheduling, and time clocks.
Homebase is a time tracking and communications solution for businesses and their employees within industries such as:
- Hospitality
- Health
- Beauty
It helps companies to manage team communication, productivity, employee scheduling, and time clocks.
9. Wrike
Wrike is a cloud-based tool that helps users manage projects from start to finish, providing complete visibility and control over tasks.
With real-time work updates and personal dashboards, each team member will clearly understand their work priorities. Wrike is designed for marketing, consulting firms, creative and digital agencies, and significant to midsize IT teams.
10. Replicon
Replicon is an app for tracking work hours designed to assist businesses in accurately billing clients and contractors. Features include GPS time tracking, real-time project progress updates, productivity dashboards, and advanced analytics.
11. Harvest
Harvest is an online time-tracking tool for teams and projects of all sizes. Every feature in Harvest is useful, simplifies time tracking, improves performance, and transforms time into revenue. It turns billable time into invoices that make it easier to pay online.
Harvest also helps companies put that timesheet data to work by turning it into visual and intuitive visual graphs that provide insight into teams and projects.
12. BigTime
BigTime will simplify your most complex problem while giving the team the tools to deliver billable work on time and within budget. You will be able to improve the productivity of your staff by better time management.
It suits accountants, architects, engineers, IT-services, marketing, legal, scientific, and management consultants.
13. Timely
Manage and grow a successful business from anywhere with a Timely time tracker. Timely is user-friendly software for all businesses. It works on all your devices promptly, allowing you to run your business on the go. It enables the creation of powerful dashboards to help companies analyze and share insights to encourage more profitable and efficient collaboration on projects.
You can track projects, monitor budget, work hours, or get a complete overview of your team’s time and performance with minimal effort.
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Choosing The Best Time Audit App
Choosing a time-tracking tool for a time audit sounds easy until you realize how many options there are. Should you go for something simple? Do you need advanced reporting? Will it integrate with your current workflow? Before you spiral into analysis paralysis, let’s break it down.
Start With the Basics: What Do You Need?
Different tools cater to various needs. If you’re freelancing, you might need a simple timer to track billable hours. But if you’re managing a team or juggling multiple projects, you’ll want detailed analytics, custom reports, and integrations to streamline everything.
Features That Can Make (or Break) Your Choice
Here’s what to look for, depending on how in-depth you want to go:
1. Calendar Export
If you’re scheduling work in Google Calendar or another app, a tool that lets you export tracked time into your calendar helps keep everything in sync. This is especially useful if you like seeing your day at a glance.
2. Calendar Analytics
Where is your time going? A calendar analytics tool will show you how much time you spend in meetings, deep work, admin tasks, etc. It’s a great way to spot time sinks and optimize your schedule.
3. Custom Tags & Properties
Flexibility is key. If your work is diverse, you can tag time entries like:
- Client work
- Internal tasks
- R&D
Makes it easier to categorize and analyze later.
4. Custom Charts & Reports
Basic time tracking is fine, but if you want real insights, look for a tool to create custom reports and charts. Seeing trends in your work habits can help you improve efficiency and make smarter business decisions.
5. Goal Alignment
Are you tracking time just for its sake, or do you have specific productivity goals? Some tools let you set targets, for example, spending X hours on deep work or limiting meetings to a set number of hours per week.
6. Sync with Google Sheets
If you love spreadsheets (or need to share data with others), look for a tool that syncs with Google Sheets. This makes it easy to create custom reports, track trends over time, or collaborate with a team.
7. Chrome Extension
Need something lightweight? A Chrome extension lets you track time without switching apps. Perfect for when you just want to hit “start” and get to work.
Why You Need to Do a Time Audit
If you frequently struggle to meet business goals, feel “busy” without making meaningful progress, or constantly run out of time without knowing why, then conducting a time audit is essential. This issue isn’t uncommon. Many individuals go through their workdays without a clear plan, losing track of how their time is spent.
This lack of structure often leads to inefficiencies that hinder productivity. Teams face similar challenges. Despite deadlines, regular check-ins, and open communication, employees may still miss targets or fail to deliver work on time.
Time Audits: A Strategy for Better Time Management and Productivity
The common excuse? “We ran out of time.” This common phrase often signals a deeper issue: unmonitored and unstructured time management.
By performing a time audit, you can identify where time is wasted, pinpoint inefficiencies, and implement strategies to ensure you and your team prioritize tasks effectively. It is critical to aligning efforts with goals and achieving optimal productivity.
Reach Your Goals and Targets
One of the main reasons goals remain unfulfilled is the mismanagement of time. We believe we’re dedicating enough hours to critical tasks, but in reality, our time is spread across low-priority activities that don’t contribute to our objectives. A time audit helps bridge this gap by offering an honest assessment of how your time is spent versus how you perceive it.
This clarity allows you to identify areas where time is wasted, enabling you to allocate your hours more effectively toward high-priority goals.
Optimizing Productivity: The Power of a Time Audit
You might discover that tasks you once deemed essential consume far more time than they should, while critical activities that drive business growth and success are consistently overlooked. A time audit empowers you to reevaluate these priorities and restructure your schedule, ensuring that your time and energy are directed toward the initiatives that truly matter for your business’s success.
It’s not about working harder but working smarter. Organizing your time around your most important goals allows you to meet targets more efficiently and effectively.
Boost Productivity
A time audit is a powerful tool for uncovering the most significant “time wasters” in your day. We often don’t realize how much time we spend on non-productive activities like browsing irrelevant websites or checking social media until we track it. By documenting where your time goes, you can pinpoint these distractions and take actionable steps to eliminate or better manage them.
Once you identify the areas that drain your time, you can make conscious decisions to cut them out entirely or allocate them to more structured periods, ensuring they don’t interfere with your productivity.
Maximizing Efficiency Through Time Audits and Focused Work Habits
Limit social media usage to specific breaks or set time limits for tasks that tend to overrun. This approach enables you to create more room in your day for high-impact tasks, boosting your overall efficiency.
By conducting a time audit, you gain awareness of your daily habits and develop the tools to maximize your workday, increase focus, and achieve more in less time.
Redistribute Time Efficiently
One of the significant advantages of a time audit is the ability to identify when you are most and least productive during your workday. Understanding these patterns helps you make more intentional decisions about allocating your time.
High-performing professionals know that not all day hours are equally effective for different tasks. When you know your peak productivity times, you can schedule your most important, demanding tasks during those hours, ensuring you are working at your highest potential.
Tackle: Revolutionize Time Tracking with AI and Calendar Integration
Tackle revolutionizes time tracking through seamless calendar integration, eliminating the need for manual logging. Our platform automatically captures and categorizes your time, providing actionable insights through intuitive dashboards and reports.
We’ve built everything you need into one seamless package:
- An intelligent tagging system that works your way
- AI-powered automation to handle the tedious stuff
- Flexible reporting tools to track what matters
- Intelligent time capture right in your browser
Trusted by Roblox, Deel, and Lightspeed Ventures teams, Tackle helps executives, team leaders, and customer-facing professionals understand and optimize their time allocation. Simply connect your Google or Outlook calendar, set up custom tags and automations, and gain valuable insights into how your team spends their time.
Whether you’re tracking strategic initiatives, measuring team efficiency, or ensuring resource optimization, Tackle transforms time monitoring from a chore into a powerful decision-making tool.
Start using our automatic time-tracking software for free with one click today!
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How to Conduct a Time Audit in 6 Steps
1. Choose the Right Tracking Method
Choosing the proper method to track your time audit is crucial to getting accurate readings. For example, time tracking software like Tackle can automate the process to provide real-time tracking, reports, and analytics to help your team understand how work hours are spent.
These tools can categorize tasks, log idle time, and integrate with project management software. If a digital tool isn’t feasible, employees can manually track their time using spreadsheets or a simple notepad. The key is consistency every task should be logged accurately.
2. Define Work Categories
Before tracking begins, establish broad categories that represent the key activities of the workday. These could include:
- Core Work Tasks (project development, client work, creative tasks)
- Meetings & Calls (internal team meetings, client calls, virtual stand-ups)
- Administrative Tasks (emails, reporting, paperwork)
- Breaks & Downtime (lunch, coffee breaks, social interactions)
These categories provide structure and ensure time logs are meaningful when analyzing the data later.
3. Set Time Intervals & Begin Tracking
Employees should track their time at regular intervals. Some prefer the Pomodoro technique (25-minute focus sessions with short breaks), while others might log their tasks every 30 or 60 minutes.
Using an automated tool, they can simply switch between tasks as they move through the day. If using manual tracking, a recurring reminder (like an hourly phone alarm) can prompt them to jot down what they’re working on.
4. Keep It Quick & Honest
The key to a successful time audit is speed and accuracy. Logging an entry should take no more than 20 seconds.
Employees should avoid overthinking or justifying their time use just a quick note about what they’re doing is enough. The goal isn’t to judge but to clearly understand actual time allocation.
5. Track for a Full Workweek
A single day’s data can be misleading because it might not reflect typical work patterns. Conducting the audit for five consecutive workdays ensures that trends emerge.
- Are meetings taking up too much time?
- Are employees consistently interrupted?
- Are key tasks getting enough focus time?
A week’s worth of data will reveal these insights.
6. Analyze the Results & Optimize
Once the data is collected, review the patterns. Are there time drains that can be minimized? Are employees struggling with distractions?
Does anyone need more uninterrupted focus time? Based on the findings, adjustments can be made cutting unnecessary meetings, improving task prioritization, or implement productivity techniques like time blocking.
Start Using Our Automatic Time Tracking Software for Free with One-click Today
Tackle revolutionizes time tracking through seamless calendar integration. Our platform automatically captures and categorizes your time, eliminating the need for manual logging.
With Tackle, what once felt like a chore transforms into a powerful decision-making tool. Simply connect your Google or Outlook calendar, set up custom tags and automations, and gain valuable insights into how your team spends their time.
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