App of the Week: SaveMyTime

Do you ever feel like there aren’t enough hours in the day, and find yourself lying in bed wondering where all the time goes? Well if you really want to know, and want to make a change, let me introduce you to SaveMyTime.

It’s safe to say this app aims to do what it says on the tin. By helping you sort out how much time you spend on the essentials, SaveMyTime wants you to trim out the unnecessary parts of your life and keep you focussed for longer.

Starting up the app, you’re asked to arrange a few of the main categories of your life and colour-code them accordingly. You can be as vague or as detailed as you like; for instance, you could split your work duties up to measure how much time you spend on the phone, tackling emails, writing reports, etc. or you could just file it all under ‘work’ for the sake of simplicity. I found keeping vague helped me better understand my overall day, but more detail helped me understand my work output, so it depends where you want to see improvement.

Once setup is completed, you can lock your phone and continue with your day. When you go to unlock your phone, you’ll receive a notification asking how you’ve spent the past few minutes/hours since you were last online, and you can select as many categories as are relevant. It’s pretty easy to pick up, and it’s at its best when you end up being caught wasting your time or mucking about on Facebook for a bit. The app is currently only available on Android devices, where the app is able to take over the lock screen and it won’t let you unlock the phone until you come face-to-face with your actions.

Being made aware of all the other things you could be spending your time doing instead of scrolling on social media or watching TV is a subtle motivator, and when the app asked me what I had been doing for the past hour only for me to select ‘social media’ over exercise, cooking or anything productive, it made me realise just how easy time is to waste. Every time you register time on the app, it gets added to your overall statistics, so you can read your daily, weekly and monthly stats to see how much time you spend goofing off instead of engaging and applying yourself.

The verdict
The app lets you catch yourself red-handed by forcing you to admit how much time you spend each day choosing the easy option. A helpful tool, the free version of the app gave me no trouble and was fairly simple to set up. If you find yourself often reaching the end of the day and wondering where it all went, I’d strongly recommend giving this app a go, just make sure you’ve got an Android phone or tablet first.

For more information, you can visit their website here. What do you think of the app? Let us know on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.