Time Tracking with Toggl

I used Toggl in the last few days and wanted to share a few observations with you.

At first, I used the web version. It is nice and works fine, but I closed it a few times by accident, or I couldn’t find it when I needed it. So I switched to the desktop version (but I still use the web version for reports).

The desktop version has a nice feature of tracking your idle time so you can decide whether it should be counted or not – very useful, as I regularly forget to switch it off.
Using Toggl helped me to understand better how I spent my time. It also encouraged me to look closer at my working habits.

During these few days I learned/realized a few things:

• I often start a task and immediately lose focus and start doing something else (uh…).
• I’m my worst enemy when it comes to distractions.
• Looking at reports is like reality check and it helped me to realize which tasks did I really put a lot of effort into (vs. my perception of where I spent my time).
• Based on the length of reported work periods I can see right now how fragmented my workday is (definitely a room for improvement here!).
• Remembering to enter a new task into Toggle whenever I start working on something is irritating at first, but soon I got used to it.

All in all, during these 3 days I learned a lot about my working habits and found few improvement areas. My goal right now would be to concentrate for a longer time on one task.

Ah, and FYI I’m using the free version of Toggl.
P.S. I miss one functionality – setting a timer so Toggl could help me with timeboxing tasks. I need to use some other tool – e.g. https://www.timeanddate.com/timer/ . It would be more convenient to have it in one place.