How the time tracker works

The timer isn't a stopwatch. It's a way to know by the evening where the day went: how many hours you worked, how many of them earn money, and what hasn't reached the journal yet.

The ring is a real clock face

Work sits on the ring where it actually happened: started at 11:40 — the arc starts at 11:40. The head of the arc is where you are now.

A full circle is twelve hours and a day has twenty-four, so the ring shows ONE half: day (08–20) or night (20–08). The half follows the clock on its own; the sun or moon in the corner switches it by hand. When the other half has work too, a dot lights up next to the sun — look there, or the number in the middle won't match the arcs.

A pause breaks the line: two runs with a gap are two runs, not one long one. Hover an arc to see what the work was and how long it took.

Several timers at once

Every project keeps its own time. Start a second one and the first pauses itself without losing anything: come back and it continues where it stopped instead of starting over.

Picking a project at the start is optional. An hour with no project counts as unpaid until a project is assigned: while it's unknown whether the work earns money, promising money would be a lie.

Two roads into the journal

Log one timer. Tap the row — the project, the task and the «Log» button open. The hour goes straight to the journal, skipping the sorter. A running timer stops first: you log work that's done, not work still going.

Sort it all. The button at the bottom closes every timer at once and hands them to «Sort out» — the same place voice notes and calendar events land. There you can fix the text, the hours and the project, then log them in one go.

Midnight doesn't split the day. Sat down at eleven at night and stopped at two — all three hours belong to the day you started: the ring doesn't reset under your hand, nothing disappears from it, and the hours land on the day you began. Need the night split in two? Do it when you sort the day — there every entry has its own date.

A paused timer left over from a previous day isn't lost: in the morning it moves to «Sort out» with its own date, so the hours land on the day the work happened.

Paid hours and the daily norm

Under the ring it says «paid so much of the norm». Paid means hours on projects with a rate; work on a free project and an hour with no project don't move the norm.

The daily norm is what's left of your yearly goal divided by your rate and by the working days till December 31. A working day is a weekday: weekends don't count, holidays aren't subtracted (we don't know your country and won't guess). The exact rule lives in «How the numbers work».

There may be no norm at all: the yearly goal is met — nothing to divide; there's no rate — hours can't be made out of money. Then the line simply reads «paid so much».

Window, bar and rail

The timer window stays on every page: go to «Rate» or «Studio» and the count is still in sight. Drag it by any spot, fold it into a bar (it sticks to the nearest edge), or send it back to the journal as a strip under the goal card. Esc returns the window to the rail.

Where the time lives

The count itself lives in your browser, not on the server. Tabs of one browser stay in sync: pausing in one shows up in the other at once.

What we keep on the server is one short marker — which device the timer runs on right now. It exists for exactly one thing: start the count on a second device and the first one learns about it within half a minute and stops, so the same hour doesn't reach the journal twice. The task text isn't part of that marker, and it's deleted the moment you pause or sign out.

Forgot to switch it off

A count running longer than twelve hours isn't a working day — it's a forgotten button. Such a timer pauses itself, and the time is closed at the twelve-hour mark and stays in the bucket: that's how long we still believed you were working. Correct the hours in «Sort out» — there's a field for exactly that. We won't erase them for you.

What the timer doesn't do

It doesn't watch what's on your screen, doesn't measure idle time and doesn't notify anyone about your work. All it knows is when you pressed start and pause.

Hours alone are not money yet: to turn them into a sum you need a rate. How it is calculated — see the method.

Next: why log hours at all, how the numbers work and all the guides.