Of all the gear that Serena Williams relies on to keep her playing at the top of her game, the piece of equipment she might value most is Toggl, an app that helps track her time, breaking down what percentage of each day goes to the three things that consume her most: her family, her businesses, and, of course, tennis.
“It’s really good for me, because at the end of the day I can say how much time I spent” on each area of her life “and how it adds up,” she says. Williams tweaks her schedule based on the Toggl data, especially if it shows that she has not been spending ample time with her 3-year-old daughter, Olympia.
“I want my percentage with my daughter to be a lot.”
Williams is a self-proclaimed tech junkie, whose digital obsession has only deepened since she tied the knot with Reddit cofounder and venture capitalist Alexis Ohanian in 2017—their engagement was fittingly announced on Reddit. When it comes to cool apps, “I have a cheat sheet because my husband is in this business,” she says with coy understatement, as though Ohanian were some IT guy. The ones she checks in with most regularly are Zero, to track her eating schedule (she fasts intermittently, typically not eating until noon), and the ubiquitous work mainstays Slack and Zoom. She’s beaming in today via the latter from her home in West Palm Beach, Florida, dressed in a plain black T-shirt with her thinly braided hair pulled loosely back. As she changes from one pair of stylish, black-framed glasses to another in order to better see the screen, she comes across more as a bookish editor than someone routinely called, without any hedging or qualification, the greatest tennis player of all time.
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