Switching from Timing 1

Timing 2 is a completely new app and a tremendous improvement over Timing 1.
However, with a new app come a few things that are different from the old version, so a few parts might not work as you expect them from Timing 1.
This article intends to reduce that confusion by highlighting behavior that has changed in Timing 2.
If you simply want to know what's new in Timing 2, have a look at this page instead.

Rules

In Timing 1, dragging any activity onto a project would associate all occurrences of that app, window title or path with that project, no matter at what time they occurred.
I.e., Timing created a "rule" to always associate that kind of activity with that project.

Timing 2 changes this behavior in two significant ways:

1. Simply dragging an activity onto a project no longer creates a rule at all.
   This change lets you assign the same kind of activity at different times to different projects —
   assigning activities is no longer "all or nothing".
   You can still create rules, however: Simply keep the ⌥ button pressed while dragging an activity from the Review screen — other screens do not support creating rules at the moment.
   That way, you can now create rules for whole keywords rather than only exact paths, which is much more powerful.
   Rules are also much more flexible than before — see the corresponding article for details.
2. Rules no longer apply retroactively.
   In Timing 2, dragging an activity only assigns its currently visible occurrences to that project, not old ones.
   Again, in Timing 1 dragging one occurrence of an activity onto a project would assign all of them, at all times.
   As Timing 2 now lets you assign the same activities at different times to different projects, this is no longer feasible.
   To mitigate that, we recommend reviewing your activities to create rules early and often.
   In case you do have to review a lot of activities "after the fact", make sure to select the whole date range you need to re-assign.

As you can see, Timing 2's rules are quite different from Timing 1's.
That's also one of the reasons why we can not migrate your existing rules.

In case you still need "retroactive" rules, have a look at filters.
They support rules similar to Timing 1's, but are less suitable for reporting.
Also, filters can become slow if their rules are very complicated.

Projects no longer overlap

In Timing 1, projects could "overlap", i.e. the same activity could be part of several projects.
Having activities in more than one project caused all kinds of problems —
for example, the total of all projects would add up to more than 100%.
It also makes it much harder to see where your time has been going.
It's also confusing given that projects should be about what you were working on — you can arguably not be working on two different things that the same time.
Therefore, in Timing 2 each activity is only part of at most one project.

However, overlapping categories of activities are still available in Timing 2 via filters,
with a few caveats as mentioned above.

"Custom Activities" have been replaced with Time Entries

Timing 1 would let you manually enter time in the form of "Custom Activities".
Those were treated like app activities, which made them not very flexible.
Plus, if you worked in apps during the time covered by an app activity, that time would be covered twice —
once by the app activities, and again by the custom activity.
In Timing 2, "Custom Activities" are now Time Entries, and they "absorb" app activities covered by them.
For example, if you create a time entry from e.g. 1 PM to 2 PM, but Timing also tracked 30 minutes of app activities during that time, Timing will no longer count this as 90 minutes of work.
Instead, Timing will simply count one hour for your time entry.
The app activities are still kept and can be expected, but as long as they are overlapped by a time entry, the time entry takes precedence.

AppleScript support

Timing 2's AppleScript support routines has been completely rewritten.
In particular, most AppleScript commands are now sent to the menu item ("TimingHelper") rather than the main app.
See our AppleScript documentation for more details.

Conclusion

These are the most important areas where Timing 2's behavior differs significantly from Timing 1's.
In case you have any questions or encounter other unexpected behavior, please contact us.

Back to the Timing Knowledge Base