Time management can be a difficult task to pull off. Viewing events as plain boxes on a grid-like calendar can be a dull way of going about things, and isn’t for everyone. These applications give you insightful views of your time management habits, bundled with visual statistics, so you can better understand how you spend your time.
1. Sectrograph
Sectograph is a daily planner app that utilizes a watch face to schedule events. The dial display gives you a visual perspective of the day ahead, segmenting your tasks into regions on the clock face. Events are synced with your default calendar app, and there’s the option to add tasks directly in the app too.
The main interface always shows upcoming events in the next 12 hours, but you can adjust this perspective by dragging the red hour hand back and forth. This adaptive viewpoint (unlike mainstream calendar apps with fixed displays) can help broaden your understanding of the time you have. Breaks are also displayed as regions between tasks, each numbered by their relative lengths.
You can add custom colors to events by tapping the three dots next to a task in the list beneath the watch interface. Here you’ll also find options to hide or rule out events from your calendar.
Perhaps the most practical feature of the app is the widget tool. Here you can view your schedule as a live display while having options to customize widget button functions. By default, clicking a task displays its length and how long until it’s due to start—useful for staying on track. You can also modify the widget color palette in the Pro version.
Download: Sectograph for Android (Free, premium version available) | iOS ($2.99)
2. Time Planner: Schedule and Tasks
If you’re looking for different and innovative ways to view your daily activities and tasks, Time Planner: Schedule and Tasks has you covered. Through its various displays, you’ll gain unique perspectives on what needs doing.
The best visual representation is seen in the Logging tab. Activities are displayed as bubbles, each with a circular timer. You can also add task bubbles that have no defined lengths, such as “check opening times”.
The Schedule tab is home to all activities and tasks with allocated time frames. To schedule an activity, press the + button in the bottom left corner of the interface. New tasks can be appended to an activity by tapping the Add tasks option, where you can mark its priority through three colored icons.
In addition to the main calendar interface on the schedule tab, there is a dedicated section for tasks without strict time regions, such as “Morning” or “Night”. This can be found beneath the 24-hour schedule and can be resized through simple pinching gestures. Having activities both with and without strict time frames in the same area is useful for analyzing things on one display without needing to switch back and forth.
Download: Time Planner: Schedule and Tasks for Android (Free, in-app purchases available)
3. blocos
Available for both Android and iOS, blocos is a unique time-management app allowing you to appreciate your time more by chunking it down into 10-minute blocks. Blocks are shown as colored small circles displayed in a grid format within the vertical scrolling calendar.
Scheduling an activity is simple—just tap on the blocks that cover the time span of the task, select Allocate Activity, then choose from the list of activities or create your own.
As well as being an efficient scheduling tool, blocos also serves as a retrospective calendar to reflect on your time-management habits. You can use the weekly display to view all 10-minute blocks in a given week, which is useful for identifying your unproductive tech habits (if you’re brave enough to input them).
The Use Template feature is a great time-saving tool if you have a repeating weekly schedule. Here you can set a date as a model for the template, make any adjustments, then apply it to any day to avoid manually filling in circles each day.
Download: blocos for Android | iOS (Free, in-app purchases available)
4. Smarter Time – Time Management
Smarter Time is an intelligent application that monitors your phone usage to present a visual timeline of the apps you’re using and the activities you’ve done.
With Smarter Time, there’s no need to manually manage your time—everything is done for you. The app automatically allocates apps into broad categories, such as “Social” which are fed into the Analytics tab to generate statistics. Smarter Time also picks up activities such as walking and time spent in a vehicle.
The Analytics tab is where you’ll find a full breakdown of your time spent in the past day, week, or 30 days. Selecting a category will display a detailed bar graph outlining your usage for all apps within that category. There’s also the Weekly Report feature, where you can gain insight into your time habits through a color-coded ring shape, showing you the amount of time spent in each category.
Download: Smarter Time for Android (Free, in-app purchases available)
5. Daily Planner With Calendar
This final application utilizes a simple, elegant way to visually represent your time. Daily Planner With Calendar uses a pie chart template to schedule your daily events. Events are shown as colored regions of the pie chart scaled relative to their length, giving you a clear perspective of how much different tasks consume your day.
There are over 100 colors to choose from when assigning a new event, giving you the freedom to create a unique chart for different days. You can also save any chart as a template if you prefer a consistent approach.
Below the main chart is a list of suggestions fetched from your recent history of events for super-fast task creation. You can drag any of these events directly onto the pie chart to paste them into a time slot. The new event page also includes an add memo feature, which is helpful for writing short notes that are attached to the pie chart display.
The app’s minimal design helps bring its visuals to the center of attention. Every new day presents a blank pie chart, split into 24 equal segments, labeled by the hour. In Daily Planner With Calendar, time management doesn’t need to be complex—you can preview all your daily tasks in one clean interface.
Download: Daily Planner With Calendar for Android (Free, subscription available)
Use These Time Management Apps to Visually Organize Your Day
Having a visual representation of your tasks and events can help you comprehend what is most important and what requires most of your energy throughout the day. Explore these applications to gain a new, better perspective on how you’re spending your time.