How you spend your time? Tracking is essential if you are paid by the hour for work, but even if you are not, is your time productive or wasted? Track activities or work with an Android app.

Do you wonder where your time has gone at the end of the day or the week? You meant to do this task or that project, but either never finished or maybe even started. A time tracker app on your phone can be used to record time spent on activities.

Here are two apps for Android phones that enable you to track how you spend your time each day. A time tracker is essential for some jobs where you need to record the time spent on a particular project, perhaps for billing a client or customer by the hour.

They can also be used for fun and you can track how much time you spend at work and at home, the time spent watching TV, working out at the gym, running, cycling, gardening or playing games on your phone, computer or console. Seeing how you spend your time enables you to organise it better and to change the balance if it is wrong, such as spending too much time playing games and not enough time exercising.

Jiffy - Time tracker

Price: Free | By: Nordic Usability GmbH | Size: 6 MB | Android: 5.0 and up

Jiffy - Time Tracker is a free app with in-app purchases for more features that can be used to record the time spent on different tasks, projects, work and so on. There are lots of apps that do this sort of thing, but Jiffy offers a nice interface and some interesting ways of working.

It is clearly aimed at recording time spent on work projects and right at the start it asks if you are an employee or freelancer for time tracking purposes. You can skip this, but really the app is best for work tracking.

On the home screen is a button to add a project and this enables you to enter a project name and customer name. Customers are remembered so you can easily select them from a list. A project can have multiple tasks, so you can break down a complex job into smaller parts and track the time spent on each of these. This is a useful activity tracking feature and is great for seeing how much time is spent on a project's sub-tasks.

You don’t have to use Jiffy for work and there is an option to set the time as work or non-work. You could just as easily add the gym as the project and the running machine, cycling machine and weights as tasks. You could then time yourself in the gym and then the time spent on each exercise.

Whether you use Jiffy for work or personal time management it up to you. It can be used for both with the work/non-work project setting. Go to the summary screen and you can see the amount of time spent on each project, and tapping a project shows the time spent on each of the tasks. You can view the day, week, month, year or a custom time period. You can also choose to see work time, non-work time or all time.

An unusual feature for a time tracker is that you can buy JiffyTags and these are the size and shape of a small coin. They are actually NFC tags and when a JiffyTag and phone come together and touch, it starts the timer on the project or task associated with the tag. The idea is that you stick a JiffyTag to your computer, notebook, key fob, lawnmower or whatever project or task you want to track.

The free version limits the tracking history to four weeks. This might be sufficient for personal use, but you need the full history if you use it for tracking work projects. You need to know how you spent your time last month or the month before.

Jiffy is an attractively designed, easy-to-use app that is aimed at tracking your work time.

Time Tracker - TouchTime

Price: Free | By: Trudo | Size: 7 MB | Android: 4.2 and up

Time Tracker - TouchTime is a very simple time tracker that can be used for recording the time spent on any activity. It is not designed specifically for tracking work projects, although it can be used for that purpose, and it is simply a general app for logging time.

On the home screen are your activities. You must define activities and this involves entering the title, selecting an icon and entering a category. You also choose a productivity rating from one to five stars. For example, a work activity might be set to four or five stars, watching TV to one star, going to the gym three starts, and so on. It is up to you.

The productivity rating is useful when viewing how you spent your time and the app shows how you spent your time and how productive you were. Seeing the amount of time you waste in unproductive tasks could help you focus on more productive ones.

Taping one of the activities you added to the home screen starts a timer. When you finish the activity or switch to another, you stop the timer. It can also be paused. If you don't have your phone with you or forget to record an activity, it can be added manually. The activity, time, date and comment can be recorded.

The summary screen shows your activity and productivity overview and these lead to a details screen where you can see simple bars showing the time spend on each activity. Another tap and a chart shows activity over time, such as a day, week or month. This is useful for monitoring activity and seeing trends like becoming more or less active, spending more time on work, less time on leisure and so on.

Time Tracker is a good general purpose app for tracking how you spend your time each day, whether it is for work or leisure.

Conclusion

There are dozens of time tracking apps and these are just two examples. Jiffy is excellent for tracking work projects, but Time Tracker is good for personal time tracking. There is some overlap between the apps though.