How to Track how you spend your days

Begin at the start

The first step is to sign up for a free Timely trial: a Timely account is needed to sync with the cloud and your other devices. Once you’ve done that, you should be able to see the calendar screen as pictured above.

Create a project

Your time is organized into projects, so let’s create one. Tap the Projects icon, then New Project. From here you’ll need to give your project a title and choose a color to make it easy to discern while in calendar view.

Set your rate

If you have an hourly rate for this project, add it here (if you’re running a team, you can handily specify a different rate for each specific person). This enables Timely to automatically calculate any hours that are billable.

Add an entry

Go back to the default Hours view and tap the + found at the top–right corner. This enables you to create a new entry. An entry refers to any block of time you’ve spent or plan to spend doing something that’s billable.

Add the time

Scroll down to Add Manually and you can set the start and finish times for the block of time you’re specifying. This is useful for blocking out time for project–related tasks you haven’t yet got around to doing.

See what’s on

Our block of time has now been added to the Hours view, so we can see the amount of time allocated. At the bottom of the entry, you can see that Timely has multiplied total hours by our set hourly rate.

Track everything

Here’s an optional but powerful feature: if you enable Timely for Mac’s Memory Tracker, it can record everything you do — from the files you work on to even time spent messing around on Facebook or Twitter.

Edit an entry

To assign a task to your project, tap it and you should be able to see the Create Entry button, alongside a summary of how long you spent on that task. Tap that button to edit its details and add it to a project.

Pick your project

This is nice and simple: tell the app what project the task should be assigned to and it’ll automatically work out how much you should charge for said task. You can also add notes and tags for your future reference.

Count the cost

The point of tracking billable hours is so that you can eventually invoice for them. Tap Projects and then choose a project to see the time you’ve spent and what to charge. Tap Reports to get more detail.

Connect your apps

Timely is unable to track all your iOS activity, but it can still record what you do in selected apps such as Gmail and Office, or track your location for any work–related travel you undertake. Go to Settings to add apps to this.

Look at what’s connected

You’ll now go through the account connection process for the app that you want Timely to track. You can check what apps are connected to Timely by scrolling to the bottom of the Connect Apps page.