The attempt to represent a signal simultaneously in time and frequency domains is full of challenges. The recently proposed adaptive Fourier decomposition (AFD) offers a practical approach to solve this problem. This paper presents the principles of the AFD based time-frequency analysis in three aspects: instantaneous frequency analysis, frequency spectrum analysis, and the spectrogram analysis. An experiment is conducted and compared with the Fourier transform in convergence rate and short-time Fourier transform in time-frequency distribution. The proposed approach performs better than both the Fourier transform and short-time Fourier transform.