We've all been there: you need to start work on a project, but first, you feel you'd better check your work email. After that, you get distracted by requests or questions in your team's chatroom, or your meetings run overtime. Suddenly, you've had no lunch, and you have to squeeze a day's worth of work into a few hours.Â
The pressure to be productive all the time kills that focus. It's also what can lead you to procrastinate more, as we tend to start with the "easier" or "smaller" tasks on our to-do lists, which can be a drain on our focus time.Â
Timing, an automatic time tracking app, was created to help you understand exactly where you're spending most of your time so that you can increase your personal productivity. (It also helps freelancers know exactly how much time they're spending on a client, so they can bill them accordingly.)
App origins: The dilemma of calculating hourly wagesÂ
Back in 2011, Daniel Alm (now an Indie Mac and iOS developer) had already created a sophisticated calculator app called PocketCAS. While working on it, he began to wonder what kind of hourly wage he was making but didn't have the discipline to use start/stop timers to calculate his hours.Â
While researching the market, he found that there were suitable time tracking apps in existence for Windows, but no such equivalents for Mac. That's when he set out to launch Timing, which would work automatically in the background.Â
Did you know? Daniel Alm, the founder of Timing, quit his job as a software engineer at Google in 2016 to work full-time on his own product, as he realized its potential.
Timing today: Increasing personal productivity everywhere
Today, Timing is an essential tool for knowledge workers and freelancers to boost their productivity.Â
The app automatically tracks how you spend your time, which apps you use, documents you work on, meetings you attend, and which websites you visit. It gives you a full overview of your productivity (with a handy timeline) and lets you organize usage by projects or tasks.Â
Fave feature: Need to bill clients for your time and work? Timing lets you create sophisticated reports that you can export to create invoices.Â
Automating small tasks for big gains: Popular Timing workflows
You can unlock even more value by connecting Timing with Zapier, to make the most out of the other tools you use. Here are a few popular workflows to get you started:
Add Timing Time Entries as Rows to a Google Spreadsheet
Create Timing projects from new rows in Google Sheets
New to Zapier? It's workflow automation software that lets you focus on what matters. Combine user interfaces, data tables, and logic with thousands of apps to build and automate anything you can imagine. Sign up for free to use this app, and thousands more, with Zapier.
