Since leaving the cosy world of full-time employment, I have been working on many and varied things. I work part-time for one organsitaion, whilst setting up my own business and also dabbling in other creative ventures.

In short, life has become complicated. I need to keep track of what I am doing and who I am doing it for. Salvation has come my way in the shape of Toggl.

Toggl homepage

What is Toggl?

Quite simply Toggl enables you to track what you spend your time on. It is a simple approach to keeping a handle on how long tasks take.

When you start to work on something you set the timer running, fill in what you’re working on and let it count the minutes. This enables you to keep track of all the different projects and clients. Each task can have a title, be assigned to a list or project and also be tagged. In addition you can have several workspaces, so working on projects with teams can be tracked.

This is just the surface of the app though. If you forget to track something it is easy to go back and fill in the details retrospectively. This is really helpful for those of us who often jump into projects when the inspiration strikes, and think about the practicalities later *cough*.

Web, app and offline Toggl

Toggl comes in several flavours. The main app is online, but it has a desktop version and a mobile app. Wherever you are, you are able to track what you are doing. Each version seamlessly syncs, and if you’re offline syncing takes place the next time you are connected.

At the web app you’re able to see at a glance everything you have done and you can find weekly reports, which can be exported as CSV or PDF documents.

All this is in the free version, but for a very modest fee you can go pro. This brings into play, amongst other features, billing, enabling you to cost your time. It also allows integration with a host of other apps including Basecamp and Freshbooks, and the ability to share reports with clients.

Sometimes, and this is rare, I have had some interesting syncing issues, but these have been easily rectified manually.

The benefit of Toggl

The key benefit with Toggl is its simplicity to track your time, while having some very powerful features when you go pro and sync it with other productivity tools. If you do freelance work or work on multiple projects and you need to keep a track of how you spend your time, then Toggl is an ideal starting place.