Have you ever counted the time? Evaluated how long it takes for each activity in your day? Toggl makes it easy, fast and free.
I'm of the opinion that every freelancer and self-employed professional should, if only for a short time, use an hour meter with Toggl to understand their productivity.
But why?
Thinking as a human being, what is the only resource we really have? Time!
I'd also like to inform you that this article is part of a series. These are some other cool tools that are worth a look:
Take care of our time
We spend our time to get or benefit from all the other resources. We work in exchange for money, we pay in exchange for solutions that ‘save' us time.
Especially in a life of professional freedom, we live with freedom of time. We work when we want to. So, if we don't understand where our seconds, minutes and hours are going, we end up living on automatic, under stress and continue to complain about lack of time.
Once we count our time and understand our productivity, we have the chance to optimize it and really handle each day with care and affection.
I wrote an article exploring this dynamic further with tips on how to count your time to improve productivity.
Toggl is the tool I use to count my time. But not just to analyze it. I also use it to generate reports for clients on jobs done by the hour and much more.
General information about Toggl
Toggl is a time counter, a time manager. A time tracker.
This means that you can describe an activity, press the start counting button and categorize each entry.
Think of it as an activity diary that shows you how long it took to do something.
Being present both on the web and on mobile devices, you always have the opportunity to press “Play” when you start an activity and “Stop” when you finish.
It's even full of cool integrations. By adding its browser extension, with Chrome, it adds a little button to hundreds of different websites so there's no “I forgot to tell you” excuse.
One of the most important parts is reporting. Naturally, after counting our hours, we need to analyze them and maybe even send PDF reports to our clients.
I've been using the tool since 2014 and this is not a sponsored post. All the tools in the Tools for Autonomy series are here because I like them and use them in my professional and/or personal life.
Toggl's features
Like many online services, Toggl has a number of free and paid features.
I value companies and products that give us something of quality in their free version and here we are very well served. I've never paid for Toggl in all the years I've been using it. The free tools are so good that it wasn't necessary, but it's certainly a service worth paying for because it's so well built.
Toggl's free features
- Time counter
- Organization of time by projects, clients and tags
- Powerful and flexible reports
- Export reports in PDF
- Works on any device
- Complete activity history
- Autotracker – Toggl warns you if you take a certain action in your browser whether it can start recording time for an activity (such as opening a program).
Toggl's paid features
- Report customization
- Insights – Receive intelligent analysis of your productivity
- Estimates for projects and clients
- Sub-projects and tasks
- Individual project dashboards
- Time tracking by hour value for each project
- Hour-counting functionalities for larger teams and groups
The paid version starts at US$9 per month per user.
Toggl's design
What I like most about the Toggl system is that it's simple and straightforward. The design works to enhance its functionalities and not to be the highlight.
Both on the web version and on mobile devices, we see the design constantly changing for the better. It's nice to see that new features and details of the user experience are always being added.
Conclusion
In this article I introduced you to the Toggl tool. Precisely because it's simple, fast and free, it's the tool I've chosen for my time tracking.
Toggl is usually one of the tabs that is always open on my computer and I recommend that you give it a try too. In particular, I recommend that you analyze your time carefully in order to enjoy life more consciously.
Have fun!
