Time management topic is widely spread on web. Efficient time management is important both in private and in working life.
Self-evidence are already explained in thousands of books and hundreds of courses: don't work more, manage your time better!
There are techniques, strategies, applied psychology and much more to help us manage our time, but I won't talk about anything of that. I have no competencies to explain why your time management is wrong. Your time, you choose.

What I can do is telling my experience with "time tracker", tools that measure the time spent on an activity.

I personally started with time trackers when I started working as a freelance. I needed them to understand why I worked so hard on any project just to obtain payments that didn't cover my working hours...

I understood that my perception of time was wrong.

I thought I worked certain amounts of time on activities which actually took much less or much more.

I started using sophisticated project management tools that included time trackers. Somewhere very impressive, some free, some weren't...

I used them for some weeks and then I lost interest.

So as a freelance that followed a dozen of projects together, plus bureaucracy works and family, I understood that those tools gave me the last thing I needed: extra free work.

I spent a couple of years and many different tries to learn that if you want to measure your time (and I strongly recommend it, especially for freelances), you need a fast and easy way, that can be used everywhere and kept always updated.

Sit down, because I'm about to reveal a secret.

Here is the tool I have been using in the past 8 years....................

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Are you shocked? I know, secrets have this effect. I don't drink american coffee though, just high-quality italian expresso.

After two years of useless, sophisticated time management tools, a scratch book and a pen become my best friends. I tracked the time I spent working and obtained detailed reports. I had one page for each project, I wrote the time at the beginning and at the end, to calculate the time spent.

This is why in my opinion, pen and paper "arrived where no one had gone before":
- they follow me everywhere so they are always update
- I can track my improvement and what to do better
- they are easy to use


I had used well-done tools (most of them), but not that well done. When I track my activity I don't personally need any list of options, because the description of activity and how much time it will take will be enough. If I want something really complicated I will add the topic (ex.: e-mail management or e-mail management for project X)

My requests were too easy to find a better tool than a moleskine!

I worked really well and was very productive. Obviously, apart from time tracking which personally made my life a lot easier (plus make me understand a lot about my working life), being productive is mainly a matter of good organization. This tool provided me more precise data of the time in which I was more productive so that I could organize my work better.

I still do track my time, but I must admit I gave up on paper since one year. After other researches I found Clockify (I'm NOT paid! They don't even know me nor I have the intention to be paid for advertising).

It is minimalist, it works on many platforms (Linux laptop, Android smartphones w/o Google, Firefox browsers) that I use and it is perfect for me creating a list of project and customers (if needed), you may add a description of activity and billable hours (option I don't use).

Compared to paper Clockify has the advantage of being on every device (which may also result annoying) and the reports are updated automatically. Not anymore weekly manual calculation.

Now the question should be: after so many years, do you still need time trackers? Shouldn't you have learned already?
And the answer is: I WISH I DID! But after so many years, time wasting is still a trap I (and you) may fall in.

So, welcome time tracking for all the working life and who knows, maybe also after the retiring.