One way or another, we all track time during the work day.
Whether it’s by diligently watching the clock, time blocking your schedule, or yelling “Alexa! Set a timer for 25 minutes!” We all do it. 🙃
These methods might get the job done when we’re in a pinch, but they’re actually not the most productive use of your time and can cost more in the long run! That’s why you need a time-tracking template in your life. 🙌🏼
Tracking time helps teams know how long tasks take, how much they’ve completed, how much it costs, and more. Plus, most time tracking templates are also customizable to any use case!
So whether you’re an attorney, freelance writer, consultant, or stay-at-home dog mom, your time-tracking template will meet your specific needs.
Read along to learn more about time management using templates, how to find the best ones, and the top 10 time-tracking templates for , Excel, and Google Sheets. 🤓
What is a Time Tracking Template?
Time-tracking templates are pre-built tables, spreadsheets, folders, or lists that help businesses and employees monitor their time at work. Like cookie cutters, templates layer on top of different time management tools to help teams use the software more efficiently and to the fullest extent.
These templates may come already tailored to a specific use case or be easily customized to align with your team’s existing processes.
Like timesheet templates or other scheduling templates, time-tracking templates gather key insights into the time you spend at work, on different tasks, entire projects, or with clients, making it easy to identify areas for improvement and visualize your productivity over time.
Project time tracking is a key part of managing productivity for any business, regardless of size or industry, but time tracking templates offer much more than a simple timer—they grant you the ability to add notes, labels, edits, and additional data to your entries with ease.
The best time tracker templates will even include automated formulas to calculate time-based salaries or billable hours.
10 Free Project Time Tracking Templates (With Excel Spreadsheets)
Your time-tracking template will act as a knowledge base for all time-related information—and time is money! So this decision is a big one. But you’re not alone; we’re here to help you. 🙂
We’ve combed the web for the top time-tracking spreadsheets and resources for different use cases, and we’re here to share 10 of our favorites! Whether you’re working alone or with a team, here are the 10 best time-tracking templates for , Excel, and Google Sheets.
1. Consultant Time Tracking Template
Ideal for: All consultant-related work
Consultants track the time they spend on client services to accurately bill their clients and keep a record of completed tasks. Doing this manually can be a tedious process, but fortunately, there are several tools available to help streamline the process! 🛠
One of these tools is the Consultant Time Tracking Template—specifically designed to capture tasks, meetings, and every client-related activity.
gives consultants the flexibility to track time via the web, desktop, or mobile app. It also enables them to gather data and insights into how they’re spending their time, allowing them to adjust their strategies accordingly.
For project managers, they’ll have a complete view of all tasks and projects in progress. (Bonus: If your Accounts Payable team needs a digital trail to verify consultant invoices, they’ll have a List View to check task details!)
2. Time Allocation Template
Ideal for: Establishing time estimates to meet deadlines
Time allocation is essential because it helps individuals and organizations work within a given timeframe. It will motivate you to complete tasks faster and ensure that nothing gets overlooked or forgotten.
Before starting any work, set goals and estimate how long each task will take, and review this when it’s done. It helps to ensure that tasks don’t stay unfinished for too long, which makes getting things done faster and more efficient. ⚡️
’s Time Allocation Template makes this strategic process easier. Use it as an onboarding tool for managers to set work expectations or offer time recommendations on everyday tasks:
- Sales teams: Prospecting, preparing sales plans, and attending sales meetings
- Marketing teams: Managing contractors, creating content, and researching competitors
- Software development teams: Generating reports, writing code, and gathering requirements
💡Pro Tip: Track time, create tasks, and view your schedule on the go with the mobile app!
3. Personal Time Management Template
Ideal for: Time bucketing to help meet productivity goals
Use the Personal Time Management Template to get more done in less time and avoid feeling overwhelmed.
Organize your life categories (Fitness, Family, Self Care, Work, Breaks, Social, and Finances) into individual tasks. From there, add Custom Fields to capture the most important information—start and due dates, time estimates, time tracked, and more!
This timesheet template doubles as a time tracker and to-do list all in one place. With the task you’ve created, switch over to a Calendar view to see the day or week breakdown.
As you complete tasks, check them off the list to help you stay on track and stay focused. Review your List at regular intervals to ensure you are making progress and adjust your schedule as needed. 🔍
💡Pro Tip: All templates are fully customizable. Simply set it up once and make any changes to the template along the way without starting from scratch!
4. Gantt Time Tracking Template
Ideal for: Gantt chart enthusiasts and tracking time for complex project schedules
Gantt charts help monitor complex projects by providing a quick representation of the project’s timeline, dependencies, and milestones. This makes it easy to identify potential scheduling conflicts, delays, and areas where additional resources may be needed.
Static Gantt chart time-tracking spreadsheets leave out a key component of a project schedule—automatic time tracking! ⏲
If you’re a Gantt chart enthusiast, you’ll love the Gantt Time Tracking Template. The template offers three separate views (Weekly, Monthly, and Yearly) to view one or multiple project schedules at any time. You can start the task timer or manually log the time tracked—without leaving your Gantt chart!
5. Time Management Schedule Template
Ideal for: Any stage in your time management journey
The Time Management Schedule Template is designed to help you build a habit of estimating your time. With this data, you’ll be able to make changes to your schedule and create space for meaningful work and experiences. 🌱
By prioritizing your work, you can manage your time more effectively by focusing on the most important and urgent tasks first. Completing them before moving on to less critical tasks will also help you protect your creative energy and brainpower for the needle-moving work.
This timesheet template has three different views to get you started on your time management journey:
- The Activity Log List summarizes all your activities by day
- The Workload view shows all your time estimates
- The Daily Activities Table view groups your categories by Activity Type
6. Hourly Time Tracking Template
Ideal for: Time tracking for hourly freelancers, contractors, and employees
The Hourly Time Tracking Template is designed to help managers make sure employees and contributors get paid for their regular and overtime hours. With a visible payroll hourly schedule in , managers and contributors have full transparency into payroll activities.
In the Getting Started guide, grab tips on how to personalize your template. Then, explore the Calendar and List views, and choose one (or a few) that you feel is most useful for day-to-day visibility. 🗓
💡Pro Tip: Change task card settings to reduce the clutter in your Calendar view, so only the most relevant information is displayed at a glance!
7. Fillable Timeline Template
Ideal for: Building a custom project schedule from the ground up
A project timeline is a great tool to lay out the sequence of your project, event, lesson, or activity. This is especially helpful for projects that don’t quite fit the mold of your workflows and processes.
’s Fillable Timeline Template provides multiple views as well as Custom Fields to let you visualize tasks and track time as they are being completed. Here are a few features included in this template for your inspiration:
- Timeline view: A linear way to visualize and schedule your tasks
- Board view: An agile tool with a drag-and-drop interface to easily move task cards from one column to another
- Money Custom Field: A formatted amount of money in any currency to view allocated and actual costs
- Progress Bar Custom Field: An automatically calculated progress bar that tracks the completion of subtasks, checklists, and assigned comments
Creating a custom project schedule involves several steps. First, gather as much information about the project as possible: goals, tasks, resources, budget, and timeline. Then, organize all of the tasks that need to be accomplished into phases and create tasks. Next, determine how tasks are interdependent and what tasks must be completed before the next can be completed.
As soon as a rough timeline is established, the schedule can be refined as you go! ⚡️
8. Attorney Time Tracking Template
Ideal for: All attorney-related work
Time tracking for busy attorneys might happen at the end of the week, month, or closing of a case. But with powerful time tracking software, making time tracking a daily habit gets easier. 💪
If you’re experiencing app fatigue, try ’s Attorney Time Tracking Template. This tool makes it easy for any attorney to manage weekly, bi-weekly, and monthly timesheets in organized views.
The Folder template also comes with suggested Custom Fields to get you started right away:
- Day of the Week: A dropdown field with options, including the days of the week
- Attorney’s Name: A people field to specify which attorney, paralegal, or legal assistant is tracking billable hours
- Case Number: A text field to put the case number of which case an attorney or group of attorneys are working on
- Client’s Name: A people field to specify the client
- Rate Per Hour: A money field to input the rate per hour
Want more options of templates for time tracking? Here you go:
9. Excel Time Tracking Spreadsheet Template
Ideal for: Freelance and contract work for small projects
Time management in Excel is a usable option if you are a freelancer or contractor and want to track your time in, time out, and meal breaks every day of the week.
This time-tracking spreadsheet is beautifully designed. It has organized sections for a person’s contact information, client details, and task-tracking summary. It doesn’t have an automated time tracking tool, so plan an extra thirty or so minutes to gather your data and calculate total hours. 📈
Once you have tracked your hours in the Excel spreadsheet, you can use this information to create invoices for your clients. These invoices will show the amount of time spent on their project and the total amount due.
10. Google Sheets Time Tracking Spreadsheet Template
Ideal for: A user-friendly experience better than Excel
If your client needs additional information like task descriptions and project deliverables, a time-tracking spreadsheet in Excel might look cluttered. Google’s daily timesheet template is perfect for capturing a detailed view of all hours worked on tasks and projects. 🔎
The time-tracking template can help individuals and organizations understand how they are spending their time.
In addition to the fixed costs, estimated hours, and actual hours sections, this Google Sheets time tracker template also provides a dedicated section that can be used to help identify areas where efficiencies, resources, and productivity may be improved.
What Makes a Good Project Time Tracking Template?
Even if you’re the team’s time-blocking expert, there are a lot of additional moving parts that go into proper project time management, and your template is here to help! Here are the top must-have features to look for in your next time-tracker template:
- Multiple views to see your calendar, tasks, projects, and time from every angle
- Flexible time tracking that allows you to manage the time you spend in different apps, tasks, and windows
- Custom fields to keep key time-related information handy and calculate invoices accurately
- Time reporting for a high-level look at your productivity on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis
- Integrations to extend the functionality of your template and keep your upcoming meetings, events, and appointments together
It sounds like a lot, but these five features only scratch the surface of the number of time-tracking options available to managers today! The trick is finding a template that has them all and is designed to help you use them in the most efficient way possible.
Disadvantages of Using Time Tracking Spreadsheets
If you have to track time regularly and consistently, time tracker spreadsheets are not the best solution for you because of these drawbacks:
- Risk of inaccuracy: Spreadsheet time tracking involves manual data entry, which increases the risk of errors. If you forget to log activities, for example, the output will be distorted
- Effort required: Manually entering and tracking time in a spreadsheet can take a lot of effort and time, reduce your productivity, and distract you from your work. It may even lead to you dropping your time-tracking activity
- Limited features: Using Excel for time management means you lose out on the benefits of a specialized tool for tracking time. Spreadsheets lack advanced features like automatic time tracking, reminders, data visualization, data validation, or integrations with other tools (e.g., task management or calendars)
- Difficult to get insights: While spreadsheets can handle data, analyzing trends or generating insights requires proficiency in formulas and data visualization skills. If you don’t have this expertise, such a spreadsheet could create data overwhelm
- Lack of flexibility: Excel sheets and Google spreadsheets are not the best solution when you want to work with your team collaboratively. Updating these in real time can create version control problems
You can overcome these disadvantages of spreadsheets by using specialized time tracking and productivity software like .
Manage & Track Time With
is the only all-in-one productivity software powerful enough to consolidate your work across apps into a single platform. Instead of struggling with an Excel timesheet template, opt to optimize your time management with ’s Project Time Tracking capabilities!
- Record time from your desktop, mobile, or web browser with ’s browser extension
- View your time tracked by day, week, month, or any custom range with detailed timesheets
- Add time retroactively or create entries by date range with manual time tracking
- Easily link time tracked to any task you’re working on in
- Connect your favorite time tracking app to to sync time tracked directly within
- Create and apply labels to easily categorize and filter time spent on tasks
- Add notes to your time entries to reference exactly what you spent time on
- Sort tasks by time spent to see potential bottlenecks or where more help is needed
- Filter tracked time by date, statuses, priority, tags, and more
- Manually adjust your tracking by adding or subtracting time whenever needed
- See a combined total of all time spent across tasks and subtasks
- Get a high-level view of your team’s time tracking and compare it against the time estimated
Take Back Your Time With Time Tracking in
A lot more goes into project time tracking than a simple timer can handle—that’s why you need a time-tracking solution to track project progress!
But not every time tracking template offers the same functionality. While time management spreadsheets are helpful, they have many drawbacks that can impact productivity.
There are many time management resources on the market, so make sure you choose one that meets your needs. Of course, you can never go wrong with an all-in-one productivity platform—. 🙂
With hundreds of time-saving features, a vast Template Library, and over 1,000 integrations, is the only time-tracking software powerful enough to connect your time, projects, chats, and team together in one centralized work hub.
Sign up for and let it take the hassle of time tracking off your hands. 🙌🏼
Everything you need to stay organized and get work done.
