For example, if your phone rings and you jump into a 20-minute consulting call, you might not start a timer, but you do want to log and bill for those hours worked. You also want an app that lets you enter a block of time post hoc in case you forget to launch a timer at all. You should be able to edit the time log to subtract however many minutes you weren't working.

The best apps let you correct time tracked after the fact, such as if you accidentally leave a timer running while you take off for lunch. The ability to edit time tracked or manually add time blocks. Nearly all time tracking apps let you track in real time, meaning they give you a running clock that you launch when you start a task, and that you can pause or stop when you finish. When evaluating the best time tracking apps, I considered the following criteria: If you're part of a team, time tracking can help you answer the question, 'What have you been working on this month?'

What do you do with this information? Perhaps most importantly, project time tracking can help you get paid, allowing you to feel confident about your invoices rather than trying to estimate how much time you worked after the fact. Whether you're working solo or in a small team, time tracking software can give you a complete overview of your daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly work.

When you know how you spend your time, you can analyze your work trends and make smarter business decisions. For more details on our process, read the full rundown of how we select apps to feature on the Zapier blog. We're never paid for placement in our articles from any app or for links to any site-we value the trust readers put in us to offer authentic evaluations of the categories and apps we review.

We spend dozens of hours researching and testing apps, using each app as it's intended to be used and evaluating it against the criteria we set for the category. All of our best apps roundups are written by humans who've spent much of their careers using, testing, and writing about software.

Time tracker with pomodoro