Free Personal Time Management Software

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Updated 6 years ago

Doing active time management is a great way of staying productive at all times while working on your business. Read on for more about time management and the software you can use to keep track of time.

Managing Your Time

There are a lot of great products out there that I have worked with in the past to keep track of projects I had to work on through my programming job life. Some were paid for by the company I worked at and others were simply free.

I even once upon a time wrote my own time management software (got it probably laying around on a website backup disk somewhere), to keep track of my own projects and that of my customers.

It is a good idea for anyone to keep track of time and manage their daily schedule, so that no time goes wasted on the many distractions we have in life.

We procrastinate as well on our work at hand by going into all these distractions.

I have worked with the non free systems such as BaseCamp, which were excellent programs, but did cost a monthly subscription plan, so when I stopped working at the firm I was working at the time (a programming firm), I had to shift to a cheaper or if possible free personal time management software package.

I found a couple of them that work well for me. First let me list the tips and tricks that I use for my way of managing my time and setting the tasks to do.

1) Schedule Your Time With A Calendar

I block all my time for each and every task with my all-round calendar on my Google account. All devices are synchronised so I can see it in my car (yes I got that option too), on my phone, on my PC and on my TV (if I wanted to).

You can do this also non-digitally of course in the form of an old-fashioned calendar book. I prefer the digital way as I am often on the road and need access to my schedule when I am booking in new appointments.

There are also similarly great calendar applications for iPhone/Mac users, but I am absolutely sure that you will be able to find it if you own such a device.

2) Make Priority Lists

Preferably the day before, but it works fine also as a first thing in the morning. Sit down with the list of tasks you got to do and figure out the priority of these things. Number from 1 to 10 on the tasks and figure also out what could be moved to another day. Create in that case also a task list for that other day or schedule it with your calendar.

3) Use A Timer

This is where the time management software comes in, but also a normal timer on your phone or the timer for cooking works fine for this. Using a timer you will be able to limit your time to do the task only for the amount of time you have set for the task.

It is important for two reasons:

a) Every time you get distracted by other tasks, you will notice it and you can say to yourself "hey, I need to do this task first for the time remaining on the clock, the other task has to wait".

b) You are not going to spend more time on the task at hand. If you set an hour to check the email or to do your shopping, you have to stick to that. Is the time over? Then break off the job and go back to the schedule and see what the next item on the list is and reset your clock.

Now let's have a look at the free software I promised to you.

Google Calendar - calendar.google.com

Google Calendar is part of Google's product suite. If you already have a gmail account or a Webmaster Tools account or an account for Adsense or Adwords or Analytics, you have already an account you can use for Google Calendar too. One login, many products.

I use many products of Google. I use Google Calendar, Google Keep, Google Mail, Google Drive, Google Photos, Google Docs, Google Webmaster Tools, Google Cloud Backup, Google Device Management & Tracking, Google Analytics, Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Meetup, YouTube, Google Plus, Mailchimp (yes also Google) and Google Search ;) and many more.

I block off all my time for everything, including breakfast, morning walk, lunch and dinner as well as other appointments. All the time I spent on helping people on WA on classrooms and PM, writing blogs, writing content for my site (SiteContent), going into Quora and other forums etc.

Google Keep - keep.google.com

Google Keep is excellent for keeping Todo lists. It gives you also the opportunity to check off for a task that is done. It is very powerful being able to checkoff something you have completed. It comes with a wide variety of things you can use it for. URL's work fine too. I'm not sure if it comes with project time tracking though, but like I said I used to have my own home made software for that.

Time Management Software

There is actually a lot of free and paid time management software. Most systems (usually online on a website) are having pricing models for several levels of functionality or the amount of people that can work and use the software.

There are those systems that can be used for free for just one person or for a small team with limited functionality. Perhaps as a company you will want to pay some money for more functionality (such as invoicing, payroll and exporting reports), while as a freelancer you can use the free and rather limited edition of the software package without any problem for the few projects you got running.

Therefore I list you one section of software online that has a free option and leave out the totally expensive ones. I will also give you some other options that are entirely free but require a bit more management from your end.

Entirely Free Software

There is some entirely free software. I mention here two of them, but I am absolutely sure you will be able to find some more when you google for it.

Google Timer

Although I didn't think they had software for it inside the GSuite, when I googled for time tracking I suddenly run into their hidden functionality.

As you maybe know there are a lot of extra functions inside Google Search that help you find your answer without much searching.

Take for example:

the calculator, when you put 1+1 in search;
the valuta trade value exchanger, when you type in 1 USD to NOK;
the showing of your IP address by typing: IP or my IP into Google
the showing of time and date when you type in: time
the showing of the date for your zone when you type in: date
and many more.. one of them being the one below.

I typed "timer" and Google gave me the same functionality as on my phone, the typical 5 minute clock timer for timing the boiling of an egg and even a stopwatch for said stopwatch functionality.

The bigger problem with just a timer is that you might want to track time per type of task, but for the sole purpose of tracking your time on the current task at hand, you can very well use this functionality.

Google Timer is of course entirely for free and always available when you are on a PC with internet.

https://www.google.no/search?q=timer

Phone Timer

On most phones, if not all, there will be a timer functionality in the software. The function is usually underneath the clock that you see on the screen or there is an app somewhere for alarm, clock or timer.

The timer software on the phone is usually similar to the Google Timer, in that it has functionality for setting a timer that runs down to zero and a stopwatch. You can usually also set alarms which are useful for making sure you stop in time for the next task at hand.

Open Source Software That Requires A Webserver

This category is great for those who know how to fiddle about with a webserver such as AMP or on their own Linux Virtual Private Server. I got a few VPS's and can easily install and run software to manage time with, so for me it is ideal, but for a lot of people online and here within WA this is a very hard and advanced task.

I am only going to manage one package that I have recently found online. I haven't tried the software yet, but it seems like it is useful enough. It is called Kimai.

Online Platforms With Phone Apps

Here are three of the online platforms I found that you can use and have a free user option. It works fine for small teams or just freelancers or us that work at WA with only our own websites.

How Long Do You spend Online?

To track the things that you do on your PC and specifically in your browser, there is a plugin or piece of software for your browser. This is however Chrome specific, but I am absolutely sure there is something for other browsers too. The plugin has a timer for every tab and the timer starts counting when you have that tab active.

This is something I learned from Jay / Magistudios here at Wealthy Affiliate. His live video classes are amazing and you can learn a lot about a variety of topics. If you haven't already, you should definitely check it out.

The plugin he uses for tracking browser activity is called "TimeStats", which is available at the extension/app store of Chrome (free).

You can also setup alerts to let you know when you have reached a certain amount of time you spend on a certain website. For example you can set it to alert you when you used your time inefficiently for two whole hours of your day on Facebook. It even has the option to block access to it.

That about sums up, about all I could find on time management software that is freely available for both professional and personal use.

If you have any tips and suggestions on other free software I should take a look at, then please tell me below.