Great for Tracking Application Usage… Almost there for tracking your working day in total

This has automated the task of tracking exactly what I do, or rather what my applications are doing, in any given day, week or any span of time. The granualarity to separate out time spent on e-mail by contact is very useful. Most apps also include document level tracking which is helpful for say, isolating time spent on financial planning vs. forecasting vs. other when using Excel. Or time spent with sales vs. engineering vs. customer when using Mail.

The only catch is capturing time spent in meetings. It appears that iCal and BusyCal don’t provide, or Timings doesn’t capture calendar schedule detail, nor would that be reported by the OS since it appears to track only the application that is open with focus (via accessibility). As most users, I would wager, multitask or have many different applications open during meetings; it’s hard to capture the time appropriately. Would be substantially more useful if the application could add scheduled items on the calendar to a meeting category (regardless of application focus). Or the option to track a backgrounded application. Automating this through calendar integration would be ideal.

As an alternative, It is helpful that Timings has a data export feature so that I can combine meeting schedule and other items to the collective data and report externally. It also has a menu bar option to add a manual entry. But this relies on manual intervention on what is otherwise completely automated. With some additional features for tracking time via calendar integration, Timings could be a one stop shop for time tracking.

Thanks for developing such a great product. All in all, well worth the money.

LexisLuther about Timing Automatic Time Tracker