The Calendar Integration

Timing can show calendar entries from your Mac's Calendar.app or iCloud Calendar right on the timeline and create time entries for them. This helps you ensure that each and every meeting is accounted for and billed.

Read on for more details on how to set up, customize, and use the calendar integration!

Setup

To set up the calendar integration, click the corresponding button in the Timing preferences or this link, then grant the required permissions:

Afterwards, you can select the calendars whose events you'd like to see on the timeline:

Adding Google and Exchange Calendars

If you can't find the calendars you are looking for in the Timing preferences, chances are that these calendars have not been set up in your Mac's Calendar.app yet. Timing can only show calendars that have been registered in Calendar.app, so if you haven't done so, please do that now:

To subscribe to Google Calendar in Calendar.app, please read this guide.
If you have subscribed to Google Calendar from Calendar.app, but these calendars still won't show up in Timing, please enable all desired calendars for CalDAV syncing in your Google Calendar settings.
To subscribe to Exchange Calendars in Calendar.app, please read this guide. The same instructions should also apply to calendars synced via Office 365, Microsoft Outlook, and similar services.

Usage

Once you have set up the calendar integration, your calendar events will start showing up on the Timing timeline as colored blocks. Click an event to create a time entry:

You can also keep the ⌥ key pressed while clicking the event to immediately create a time entry, skipping the customization dialog. Timing will automatically try to guess the correct project for the new time entry from the event's properties and pre-fill the time entry's title field.

In addition, when starting a timer or creating a time entry from the Timing tracker app (e.g. after a meeting has ended), Timing will list your recent calendar events as suggestions for the time entry's title and project. This should make it easier to note down meeting details for e.g. Zoom meetings, for which Timing can not obtain meeting details directly from the Zoom app itself.

Please note that all-day events will not be shown in order to avoid cluttering the timeline.

How Timing suggests projects for calendar events

First of all, it is important to note that Timing will never create time entries for calendar events in a fully automated fashion; you’ll always need to click a suggestion on the timeline in order to create a time entry. For then determining which project to suggest for that new time entry, Timing will perform the following checks:

Timing will check if a previous time entry has been created for a calendar event with the same name. If that is the case, Timing will suggest the project that was used for that previous time entry. This is useful to consistently pick the same project for recurring events.
If Timing can’t identify a prior time entry with an identical event name, it will then try to apply your project rules to the event. You can learn more about this in the corresponding section of the rules documentation.
If no project rule matches the event, Timing will then check if there is a previous time entry created for an event from the same calendar. I.e. if you previously created a time entry for an event from the same calendar, Timing will suggest the project that was used for that previous entry.

If no previous time entry was found in either of the above ways, Timing will try to try to match your projects in the order specified in the rule order settings with the event name or the calendar name, in the following order:

First, it will go through the list of projects in the order specified in the rule order settings to check whether any of these projects has a name identical to the name of the calendar that the event is in.
If no project with an exact match to the calendar name is found, Timing will then check (again in the same order) whether any of the projects has a name that is a part of the calendar event’s name.
If still no match is found, Timing will then go through the projects once more, this time checking for each project whether its name is contained inside the event’s calendar name, or conversely, whether the event’s calendar name is contained inside the project’s name.
Finally, Timing will check whether any project’s name is contained inside the event’s notes.

Please note that this means that a project’s position in the rule order settings may play a role, but the project’s actual rules do not apply to calendar events at all; they are only relevant for categorizing app usage.

Additional Resources

The calendar integration only allows showing calendar events in the Timing timeline, it does not support creating calendar events for the time entries you created in Timing. However, we do provide scripts to accomplish this for both Calendar.app as well as Microsoft Outlook.

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