Time Doctor

A careful management of your time is sure to push any project or business to success. This can easily be done with timetables or agendas, but too much paperwork can get frustrating and rather time-consuming than saving. On the other hand, computer applications like Time Doctor let you keep track of time spent on each activity in order to see how fast and well you can finish your work.

For fully experiencing all the application puts at your disposal and even to get started you need an active Internet connection in order to create a personal account. This later on enables you to receive reports based on your performance, which comes in really handy for large projects that take time.

In terms of visuals, elements are polished and perfectly blend in together to form a modern interface, with highlighting effects when hovering the mouse cursor over buttons and tabs. Just to help you out, a side panel makes sure you go through a series of steps, getting you accustomed to its features in only a few seconds.

Adding a task is incredibly easy. An input field, which you find next to the big “GO!” button, lets you write down the name of the task you're working on. Pressing the big button mentioned earlier starts counting how much time and effort you invest until the task is either put on halt or finished.

Whenever a task is active, a small panel is displayed on your desktop showing you the current work item and corresponding elapsed time. The application lets you start more tasks, but the desktop gadget only displays one entry unfortunately, and you can't interact with it to cross off completed assignments.

What's more, clicking on a task in the list immediately starts it, which can get frustrating and confusing, because you can't check time for a paused tasks unless you start it again. Even worse is that this also applies for completed tasks that are crossed out, unless you remove them from the list.

With no color differentiation on tasks in the list, and rather disappointing amount of flexibility, you might start to heavily question practicality. What pulls it from the dust is the possibility to issue different reports, such as some related to time, for all of them, poor performance, projects and a few more.

You need to be connected to the Internet because reports are generated in an online platform which also lets you export them as PDF, XLS and CSV. Moreover, periodical emails are sent with daily reports so you get an overall idea of time management each day.

Time Doctor comes with good intentions, making a good first impression through its polished interface. Tasks are easy to create and tracked with little to no effort on your behalf, with different reports to generate. However, flexibility is a great weakness due to the frustrating selection and activation of trackers and shallow related info you can add or view related to tasks.