I self-hosted a time tracker to master my work-from-home schedule, and it did wonders

Like most freelancers and remote workers, I also work from home the majority of the time. There are instances where I head out to a café or a co-working space to work for better productivity. Regardless of where I work from, though, I constantly face issues with accountability. I have a fixed schedule every day, based on which I take up work for multiple clients. A lot of times, though, I end up procrastinating — leading to delayed timelines. Thankfully, I decided to fix it before it got too late. I employed a bunch of methods, like using a to-do app to make a note of my deliverables, prioritizing my tasks, and, more recently—logging the time I spent working on a certain task.

After trying out several apps and software, both on my smartphone and computer, I zeroed in on TimeTagger. There are a couple of reasons I chose TimeTagger over other similar alternatives. The first one is the simple yet effective UI, and the second is the fact that it can be self-hosted and synced across multiple devices. So, I got hold of the Docker image, hosted it on my home server, and started logging my working hours in TimeTagger. A few days into it, and I can clearly see how it has made me a lot more accountable than I used to be. If you, too, work from home or find it difficult to track your time, here’s why TimeTagger is the solution you need.

Extremely simple to log time

Log your current or past work

Technically, logging time or working hours is a rather simple task. There are several apps that let you do it, or you can even do so in an Excel worksheet. However, the main advantage of TimeTagger is how the UI is welcoming and provides a graphical overview of the time you’ve spent in the day working. There’s a vertical bar on the left that shows the time of the day. Simply drag your mouse to select the desired timeframe in the bar, and add details about the work you’ve done in that time. That’s pretty much it. Once done, you can see a summary of your task linked to that specific time.

When adding your task, you can include details of it, any relevant tags, and the exact duration for which you worked on it. You can add multiple tags to indicate multiple types of work. You could add a tag for each client, for personal or professional work, or even the kind of task, like writing, researching, etc. On the right side, you will see a persistent table displaying all the work you’ve completed in a day. The total number of hours spent working is displayed right at the top. This acted as a good motivating factor for me, since I wanted to see that number hover over the 6-8 hour mark every day. Those who bill their clients on an hourly basis will also find TimeTagge extremely helpful, since you can clearly see your time split every day across multiple clients, and bill them accordingly.

Helpful search features

Add tags to each task

There are two primary use cases for adding tags to your tasks on TimeTagger. Apart from making it easy to differentiate between the work you carry out for multiple clients, you can use tags to search for your work sessions. Let’s say you want to calculate the cumulative time spent completing a certain project. Now, if you tagged the project with a certain label, you can look for a keyword and the accompanying tag. That way, you can see the total time spent on the project, as well as time spent on that one particular session linked to that keyword.

Apart from the search features, I also like how TimeTagger gives you the option to zoom in and out of the time overview. By this, I mean to say that I can look at my tasks and the time spent on them in a single day, a week, a month, and even a year. This is helpful to find the average time you spend working every week or every month, so that you can set targets for the upcoming weeks or months. Moreover, the UI has a handy guide that instructs you on how to add new tasks that you forgot to add earlier, make changes to existing timings, etc. I wish more apps came with detailed instructions like these!

Don’t lose track of time

When you start logging in your work hours, you immediately tend to develop a sense of responsibility for completing tasks sooner. I noticed that once I started using TimeTagger, I spent less time doom-scrolling on social media platforms or watching pointless content, and instead, focused on finishing my work on time. A big motivation was that every time I opened TimeTagger, it would only show a few hours spent on work at the end of the day, which was way less than what I expected from myself. I wanted to increase that to at least 6–8 hours a day, which I was able to achieve after carefully changing my habits and using the Pomodoro function in the app for effective and focused work.

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