In this episode, I’ll answer the question: Should solopreneurs use Timery to track time on the Mac?
Timery intro
So, if this is the first episode that you’re listening to, Welcome, and I want to quickly mention that this episode is part of a short series on time tracking.
In the previous episode, we explored the pros and cons of Toggl, and before that the various benefits of time tracking, as well as the different tools that we can use on the Mac.
The three tools in questions are Toggl, Timery and Timing. And so in this episode, I will cover the second one on the list: Timery.
And so what is Timery? Well, it’s an Apple centric solution that can help you streamline the creation and the management of Toggl time entries. Yes, you heard it right? It’s actually a third party application that can access the Toggl database, which means that yes, it requires the creation of a Toggl account first.
Now, having said that the Timery app on Mac, iPhone and iPad is, in my opinion, a much better alternative to the native Toggl app.
Simply because Toggl’s developers decided to create a generic app that must work on multiple platforms, including Android, , and Windows.
On the other hand, the Timery developer called Joe Hribar is able to fully leverage the native capabilities of Apple’s operating systems and thus offer a much better app experience.
Now if needing a Toggl account seems a bit too much. Let me reassure you, the only thing you absolutely need to do on Toggl’s website is create an account, and if you absolutely want to, you can rename then the default workspace. That’s it.
After installing Timery, you’ll just need to log into your Toggl account and you can start immediately managing your clients, your projects, and your tags, directly from the Timery app, no need to visit a webpage.
And configuring Timery on the Mac is done either from the sidebar, so on the left, or via the Preferences pane or the Settings pane, depending on the version of macOS that you have. Either way, my recommendation would be to start with your default workspace.
If you have more than one, you choose which one is the default one, then the clients associated with your default workspace.
Then for each client, the projects that you intend to track time for, and finally, the tags that can be associated to each time entry, regardless from the project.
One of the benefits of time tracking is to generate reports that will give us an overview of how and where we spent our time.
And since reporting is done at the workspace level, I really recommend to keep the number of workspaces that you manage to the minimum.
This is why ultimately I chose to use a single workspace in which I have two main clients: personal and EasyTECH.
And so this allows me to generate charts and reports combining all the time that I track rather than having to manually switch workspace all the time.
And this single workspace approach simplifies also the management of clients and projects and actually talking about those. For the time being, I have settled on having only two clients and 11 projects split among those almost equally. So on the personal side, I have six projects, spouse, kids, relationships, me time, distractions, and something that combines different three things together.
It’s called Admin plus house plus errands. I didn’t want to split them up. So I’ve put them in a single project. On the professional side of things, I have five projects, one called on the business. I use that when I strategize or when I work on my business goals and business plans. And then I have four other projects, admin, business dev, operations, and finance.
So for instance, preparing and recording Macpreneur episodes currently fits into the business dev project for the EasyTECH client, but, I’m open to the idea of creating a third client in the future that would be called Macpreneur. That way I would be able to better and more easily analyze the time that I spent on this part of my business, especially since my ambition is to make the Macpreneur brand my main focus.
Now, while a time entry can only be associated with a single project, we can use tags to analyze the time that we spend across multiple projects. And like with Gmail, we can attach multiple tags to the same time entry. So for instance, I have two tags. One called -Draining and the other one called -Energizing that I attach sometimes to time entries to help me quantify how fulfilling the work that I do really is.
So I don’t apply those systematically, but whenever I feel unhappy or overwhelmed. I will choose a timeframe, say five days during which I’ll take the time to add those tags to the relevant time entries. This usually helps me diagnose the potential source of my frustration and then guide my decisions regarding certain types of project that I pursue, or clients that I take on in the future.
For business development activities, I’m using generic tags like prospecting, online marketing, in-person marketing.
And because in addition to my freelance training business, I’m also the director consultant of a BNI group in Luxembourg. Anything that is related to that activity is tagged BNI, regardless of the project that it falls into. And it is thanks to that tag that I know that this role takes about 10% of the time that I spent for EasyTECH.
Now, having said that, you can quickly go overboard with tags if you don’t pay attention. So my advice is to start small and only introduce new ones when it is absolutely needed.
Advantages of Timery
Putting the initial setup aside, here are a few things that I love about Timery and the main reasons why I prefer it to the official toggl app.
So number one, the Mac app has a responsive design. In other words, by default, the interface will look a lot like the iPad version, but when you reduce the width of the Timery window, the sidebar automatically disappears to turn the interface into an iPhone like app with buttons at the top.
A small thing that makes a huge difference is also the ability to see the start and the end times of each entry in the list view.
This little detail saves me the need to click on the time entry just to double check when something actually started or ended.
Another thing that makes my life much easier is the ability to tell Timery to set the start time at the exact time that the previous entry ended.
So it happens often that I start doing something, then I realized I forgot to start the timer, and with Toggl I would need to click multiple times, and use the down arrow to adjust the start time and with Timery, it just one click.
And in addition to that, there are other predefined buttons, like “one minute ago”, “five minutes ago”, “one minute later”, “five minutes later”, and even “now”.
You can even swipe right onto an existing time entry and then choose to restart it, “now”, “one minute ago”, or “five minutes ago”, or “since the last stop time”, so it’s even better than the play button on the Toggl app, right? On Toggl, you have a play button, it’ll restart a time entry now, and then you would need to manually adjust the start time. With Timery, you can choose exactly when you want that start time to be.
And it’s even possible to define some frequently used time entries as saved timers with a predefined project, a predefined set of tags, and these saved timers can even be triggered via a keyboard shortcut. This is especially useful in conjunction with a Stream Deck since it’s possible to configure buttons to act as keyboard shortcut trigger.
So if you combine those two together, it means that starting a Timery timer can be done simply by pressing a button on my stream deck. I love that.
And on the Mac Timery has implemented support for shortcuts automation, which is lacking from Toggl.
So thanks to that I’m able to quickly craft standardized time entries in relation with the various office training that I facilitate for my main clients.
So even if it does not necessarily save me a lot of time, it provides the guarantee that the name of my time entries will be consistent and also, It makes sure that I don’t forget the necessary tags.
I’ve also created a Shortcuts action that allows me to list all my saved timers and then quickly select the one that I’d like to trigger, which is especially useful when the keyboard shortcut conflicts with those to create screenshots.
So yes, it’s command one, command two. So if you remember, command three, command four, command five create screenshots. So those cannot really be used for saved timers in Timery, unfortunately. So with this shortcut automation, I’m able to still trigger those.
And finally, the Timery app allows to create, save, and export custom reports, removing the need to access the Toggl web interface.
And the granularity with which you can slice and dice the tracked time is really mind boggling. You have built in reports for projects overview ,for tags overview. You can also have reports that show you the yearly summary, the monthly summary, the weekly summary. And once you are in those summary reports, you can drill down on a project by project basis as well.
You can even filter by project, by tags, and even filter by text within the time entries, all of that directly from within the Timery app.
And yes, you can export reports in CSV format, so something you can open in Excel or Numbers, and you can export that right from within the Mac app from Timery. And it’s even possible to configure whether we want the items sorted alphabetically or by durations.
And also how the time entries are grouped together. In fact, when they are grouped together, it’s super easy to generate pivot tables and pivot charts if you would like to.
And so in that sense, the only reason one might need to access the Toggl web interface would be to create a new workspace. That’s it.
Drawbacks of Timery
Having said that, there are a few things that might be a no-go for you. So unlike Toggl Timery only runs on Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. So if for some reason you need to track time on Android or Windows, having to constantly switch between two different user interfaces might be a source of stress.
Second, Timery doesn’t offer any way to configure time tracking collaboration, which Toggl fully supports.
So in other words, if you need or you want to track time with other people, the only way to take care of that is via the Toggl web interface.
It also lacks the ability to record the Mac activity automatically, which is why actually I’ve kept the official Toggl app on my Mac and I leave it running side by side with the Timery app.
And finally the free version of Timery is limited to four saved timers to the ability to manage the four latest time entries and to only add tags and projects, not clients.
So if you want to unlock all the capabilities, you will need to pay either 99 cents per month or $9 99 per year, which to me was a no-brainer. You can try all these features for free for two weeks and then decide whether or not it’s worth the money.
Recap & outro
So ,to recap what we covered today, Timery is a great tool for solopreneurs who only have Apple devices and want to be able to manage everything directly from the desktop app.
Even though it requires a Toggl account, setting it up is extremely quick and easy.
And solopreneurs who want a clean user interface, a quick way to generate reports and the ability to automate time tracking using shortcuts on their Mac will love Timery.
On the minus side, the free version is very limited in its functionalities and even when subscribing to Timery Club, that’s what it’s called, the Mac app doesn’t offer automatic background activity tracking, or the ability to create and configure workspaces, which allow for time tracking collaboration.
So in the next episode will explore Timing. It’s another dedicated Mac app that offers many of the advantages of Timery while offering automatic background activity tracking and cataloging.
Now, if Timery didn’t fully seduce you, and if you don’t like dealing with web interfaces, then make sure to download the next episode Even better, click on the follow or subscribe button to make sure that you don’t miss any future episode.
So that’s it for today.
I hope this episode has helped you decide whether you should give Timery a go or not.
Check out macpreneur.com/tools for a list of all the tools I use to streamline my business. It’s macpreneur.com/tools
And until next time, I’m Damien Schreurs, wishing you a great day.