Try Harvest, writes Perry Timms
“There is no time management, only energy management”, has become something of a personal mantra for this reviewer – but Harvest shows there’s still value in a time-tracking app.
Let’s face it: most days are a blur of meetings, calls, events and emails, only rarely featuring that other stuff we call ‘work’. Harvest provides a way of logging your activities, so you can improve how you manage your energy and focus.
Harvest has a particular benefit: it can synchronize with your project management or task applications, like Basecamp, Trello, or, in my case, Asana. This helps you identify the energy you need, based on the time you devote to particular pieces of work. What’s more, you can add your team, so you have sight of their workloads: Harvest also links to Forecast, the project and resource management app, to help with allocating time to people. Being able to include time for breaks, learning activities and other factors helps make it clear that you don’t expect people to deliver on tasks the moment you assign them.
There are lots of productivity apps out there, but Harvest is a simple start-stop time tracker that happens to integrate with the tasks you set, and the schedule you create, to give you more say on how you use time and energy.
That’s something that could benefit us all.
