Which apps do you use most on your Mac? When do you use those apps? How do you know your guesstimate of when and how much is accurate? Your Mac won’t tell you. Timing can.
Timing is one of those rare Mac apps that can help you become a more productive human being and a more efficient Mac user, provided you understand how and when and for how long you use the apps on your Mac. So, Timing tracks time. App usage, specifically.
The Ulterior Motive
Many Mac users make a living on their Macs, so they have a need to track the time spent on various tasks and projects. Timing does that, too. The app resides in the background and monitors which apps you use and when you use them. It’s smart enough to categorize activities on various apps, and understands which blocks of time may belong together.
As with any good time tracker, Timing lets you add tasks to track while watching in the background to make sure you’re actually doing what you started to do.
Nice, right? Think of Timing as a mashup of a task manager, a calendar, and a time tracker, but all in one.
Everything begins with a smart timeline which simply displays everything you’ve been doing on your Mac. Click to assign a whole block of time to a task or project or meeting. Timing takes care of manual entries and automated entries.
By listing activities you can then drag and drop them onto the timeline to fill a day with important tasks or projects.
Got graphs?
Timing is no wimp when it comes to visuals and eye candy, either. What all of us want and need is a quick look at where the time went, where it’s going, and how we got here. Digging through the detail of a spreadsheet-like log isn’t the answer.
So, what you see is what you get. Graphs that display total time, task time, time per project, and everything you worked on including which applications were used.
It’s that last component that intrigued me the most.
At work I have my own share of tasks, projects, responsibilities, and the ongoing need to justify– another way where tracking helps– what I do all day. Timing does that because it can not only attach a task to a project, but an app’s usage to either or both. And, it can display quickly which time of the day and which days of the week are the most productive.
What’s that worth? Plenty. What’s missing? Timing is friendly, easy to set up, gets into task tracking quickly, has a somewhat gentle learning curve, but is Mac only in an era when my iPhone goes with me more frequently than I sit in front of a Mac.
