I love to track my time with Toggl!
I also love to set weekly and monthly goals for important activities like coding or learning a new language.
I wanted to see my daily, weekly and monthly progress toward these goals, so I’ve created Hours app.
The main purpose of the Hours app is to help you invest more time in important activities, day after day, and achieve long-term goals.
Why I decided to make this app
For continuous development of my coding skills and for releasing new apps and app updates, I set weekly and monthly goals for time I should invest in coding.
I track my time with Toggl – in my opining it is the best tool for time tracking.
The only missing feature for me – an ability to set daily, weekly and monthly goals for projects or clients and see your progress toward these goals.
At the end of the day I copy hours from Toggl to the Notion, where I track these long-term goals.
Monthly goals and derived weekly goals from it, I put into the Notion monthly entries.
Actual hours I add to Day entries, which are linked to Week and Month entries in my Notion system
The main problem with this approach is that I need to manually update today’s coding time, then go to a week or month entry to check the progress in the middle of the day. For me Notion is good for planning and analysing results in mid or long-term range, but not for realtime progress checking.
So I’ve decided to make the Hours app to fill this feature gap.
Main features of the app
1) Create flexible goals for specific Toggl clients or projects and set time goals for days, weeks and months. Weekly and monthly goals could be calculated based on daily goals or you could set them manually.
2) See your progress immediately – for the day, the week and the month.
3) Quickly and easily start timers related to the goals by tapping on it – timers most used this week will be shown immediately, other timers are just one tap away.
In the future updates I plan to add widgets, notifications and timer functionality.
Other important considerations
– Hours app is not and does not try to be a replacement for official Toggl site and apps – all timer entries are created and stored on Toggl’s servers. To create and edit projects and clients or check and edit individual time entries you have to go to the official site.
– Hours app was made to help you and me move forward today, this week and this month, not to look back on the past. Thus historic results are not accessible in the app. To see it you could use superb reporting functionality on Toggl site.
Obviously, you need a Toggl account for this app. Since the app uses Reports API you need to log in your account with your Toggl API key.
Why I love Toggl
1) It is easy to track time with Toggl – create a project and start tracking!
2) You could start your timers from any device – they have apps for all operating systems (desktop and mobile), extension for browsers, Apple Shortcuts support
3) Superb reports
4) API support
5) Free basic functionality
Why I love time tracking
1) What gets measured gets managed
When you know how you actually spend your time, you could find ways to improve it. Without it you could lie to yourself that you worked all day and watched YouTube and Netflix only for an hour.
It also provides you with clarity about your real priorities – you could think that activity X has real importance for you, but if in reality you invest in it about zero hours this month, maybe it is time to stop fooling yourself.
2) It helps to focus on things in your locus of control
As stoics said 2000 years ago, to live a happy live, you need to pay attention only to the things, which are in your control and accept all other things the way it happens.
With my coding example, I can’t control how many users will download my apps and how will they rate it. All I can do is to invest time in coding and improving my skills and make the best version of the app I can. And that’s it. Other things are outside of my control, so it does not matter.
So time tracking helps to move my focus to the most important metric – how I invest my time
3) Peace of mind
As a direct result from previous point, since only invested time matters, when I see, that I’ve completed my time goal for the day, moved forward with weekly and monthly, I could relax and have а good rest for the end of day.
4) Time as the most valuable asset we have
As you might have already guessed from my other apps, I like to remind myself and you that our time is limited and thus important. 1440 app reminds you about every passing minute, Cross out calendars shows you every passing day.
Almost everyone understands that it is useful to track your money spendings, but time is more important since it is more limited – you could earn more money, but not time (at least for now).
Without paying attention to your time spending, all your time will be gone and spent on unimportant activities. Unimportant by your own definition.
I hope Hours app will help you achieve all your time goal and move forward to the life you want to live.
If you have any questions, suggestions or ideas about the app – feel free to contact me with form on About page or send Feedback from the the app Settings.
If you enjoy using Hours app, please, consider supporting me on Patreon or buying me a coffee.