10 time management and self-organization tools

6 min readMay 28, 2018

These time management and self-organization tools have useful features to manage tasks and organize goals not just for freelancers, but also to the active employed population. Whether for work, home, or school, being able to organize our time is often key to success in our busy lives. Today multitasking is pretty much seen as a necessity and all these apps can help you to manage time for any business or personal situation.

Timely

Pricing

COMPANY: $21 per month per person
ESSENTIAL: $14 per month per person
SOLO: $7 per month per person

Timely is a cloud-based time tracking tool that provides invoicing and timesheet features for small businesses and freelancers. Timely tracks activity across all your devices while you work and creates fully-representative timesheets for you. Is also shows you everything your team works on in one place. You can coordinate resources, distribute workloads and lead more accountable teams without chasing or digging for information. Timely offers integration with third-party applications such as Google Calendar, MailChimp, Xero, ZVend and MYOB.

Harvest

Pricing

Free: 1 Person 2 Projects $0 forever
Solo: 1 Person Unlimited Projects $12 per month
Team: 2+ People Unlimited Projects $12/person per month

Harvest is a web-based time tracking tool that offers invoicing and timesheet features for small businesses and freelancers. Key features include time and expense management, team management, project management, scheduling and invoicing. You can log hours into a timesheet or start a timer from your desktop, phone, or browser. Visual reporting gives you essential information about your team and your projects based on timesheet data. Harvest integrates with different solutions, such as Asana, JIRA, Basecamp, GitHub and Quickbooks.

Toggl

Pricing

Starter: $9 per user per month (billed yearly)
Premium: $18 per user per month (billed yearly)
Enterprise: $49 per user per month (billed yearly)

Toggl is a cloud-based project management solution that specializes in time tracking. Time entries and active timers are synchronized in real-time via a cloud service to the website and various applications. Reporting features allow users to track the time spent on various projects and analyze productivity. Toggl can be up and running from scratch in less than a minute. It integrates with with Trello, Asana and other productivity tools. Mobile apps are available for Android and iOS.

Freelancy

Pricing:

$ 29.90 per person

Freelancy is a time tracker, project management and invoicing software for individuals and teams. It helps you keep track of your time and earnings, bill your clients and provides you with detailed reports. It lets you classify the time you track by project. Every project can have an hourly rate associated with it, and you can have different currencies for different projects. The reports provided by Freelancy allow you to track hours worked and earnings, you can filter the graph by time, project, billable rate, and team member.

Tomato Timer

Pricing:

free

Tomato Timer is a flexible Pomodoro Technique timer. Pomodoro Technique is time management method created by Francesco Cirillo for a more productive way to work and study. Tomato Timer was inspired by Tomatoi.st and it uses jQuery and HTML5 features like Desktop Notifications, Audio API and Local Storage instead of relying on Adobe Flash and other such technologies. It has clean and crisp interface with a mobile friendly layout. You can use keyboard shortcuts to control the timer.

FocusBooster

Pricing

Starter: Free. For those getting to know focus booster or the pomodoro technique.
Individual: $2.99. For students, employees and individuals wanting to track time or tasks.
Professional: $4.99. For consultants, freelancers and anyone wanting to track time and/or revenue.

Focus Booster is a desktop and mobile app that allows you to create timed, focused work sessions based on the Pomodoro technique. Unlike other time management tools, FocusBooster doesn’t have pause button. The developers explain it like that: “This is the motivation for you to remove all distractions in the first place and is in line with the pomodoro technique”.

Tick

Pricing:

Free: 1 Project, Unlimited people, Basecamp integration
$19 / month: 10 Projects,
$49 / month: 30 Projects, Recurring projects
$79 / month: 60 Projects, Recurring projects
$149 / month: Unlimited Projects, Recurring projects

Tick is another cloud-based project time tracking cross-platform solution which offers multiple timers, budget tracking, reporting, and more. Tick’s timecard works in three steps: select your project (organized by client), select the task, and enter your time. Once your time is entered, you can enter notes, use timesheet reporting to get budget feedback or dig deeper into projects with just a click. You can run one or a few timers to track time spent on different tasks. Tick integrates with Trello, Asana, and Basecamp and allows to export the time entries to Freshbooks or Quickbooks for simple invoicing.

OfficeTime

Pricing:

starting from $3.99/one-time/user

A time tracking software for Mac, Windows, iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch. OfficeTime records billable hours to the minute and expenses. One of its advantage is that an Internet connection is not necessary to be able to run this app. Users can run multiple timers at once, report individually on specific projects, categories, or employees; or they can create reports that display selections of each of those options. OfficeTime does not support many integrations with other apps and services.

DeskTime

Pricing:

DeskTime Lite: Free
DeskTime Pro: $7 per user per month

DeskTime is a fully automated cloud-based tracking solution for tracking productivity of freelance workers and collaborating teams. It totals the amount of working hours spent on tasks and projects without any manual data entry required and also tracks in real time the usage of websites and apps. DeskTime tracks the apps and URLs visited at particular moments, along with any offline time spent carrying out other specified activities. This way freelancer’s activities are more transparent for an employer. DeskTime also helps in planning of workloads and allows the generation of reports for calculating monthly salary.

Cushion

Pricing:

Starter: $8 per month
Pro: $18 per month
Pro Plus: $48 per month

Cushion is a tool for freelancers that allows to plan & visualize your entire year, avoid overbooking yourself, sync with your calendar, send invoices, track time and switch timers and compare estimated and tracked time. This is just the most significant part of all the features Cushion offers.