Preferences
In this article, you'll learn to customize Timing's interface and tracking behavior to your liking.
Table of Contents
General
- Launch tracker at login: If enabled, the Timing tracker app will automatically launch when you sign into your Mac. We highly recommend to keep this setting enabled, as Timing can't track your time when its tracker app isn't running.
- In the status bar: Provides various options for what information to show in the status bar.
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Working hours: Timing will make sure to always show the hours you select here in your timeline. This lets you quickly create time entries via the timeline, even for times when no app usage has been recorded.
In addition, this preference is used to determine which hours to restrict tracking to, if the corresponding option in the "Tracking" preferences has been enabled.- Automatically zoom the timeline to these hours: If enabled, the timeline will automatically zoom to the hours you select whenever you switch days. This allows Timing to display more detailed information about the times recorded during your working hours, at the cost of having to scroll more to see the rest of the day.
- Remind to review activities: Timing can regularly send you a notification summarizing how much time you spent. This option controls the frequency of that notification.
- Collapse activities shorter than: Timing will combine individual app usage entries shorter than this threshold under a single e.g. "(Entries shorter than 15s each)" entry. This keeps your activity lists tidy.
Tracking
- Idle time detection: Timing can automatically suspend the tracking of app usage when you haven't touched your Mac's keyboard and mouse for a while. In addition, it can then stop any running timer and/or make sure that no time is lost by asking you to record what you did while you were away.
- Auto-stop timers when my Mac goes to sleep: If enabled, Timing will automatically stop any running timers when your Mac goes to sleep. Otherwise, timers that you forget to stop may continue running for up to 24 hours.
- Disable automatic tracking: Controls whether to not track app usage on weekends and/or outside working hours. Timers are unaffected by this setting.
- When a video call ends: Timing can prompt you to record time whenever a video call ends, as determined by this setting.
- Shortcut to start/stop a Timer: You can press this key combination in any app to start a new timer or stop the currently running one.
- Also fall back to tracking via Screen Recording when required: If this option is enabled and the Screen Recording permission has been granted in System Settings, Timing will automatically fall back to tracking via Screen Recording when it can't track app usage via the Accessibility API. Please refer to our Frequently Asked Questions for more information.
- Advanced Accessibility tracking: Advanced Accessibility tracking lets Timing gather more details for Firefox, Skype, Slack and a few other apps. If you encounter problems with resizing these apps' windows, try turning this setting off.
Advanced
- Automatically check for updates: If unchecked, you'll need to manually have Timing check for updates via the "Timing" menu. We strongly recommend keeping this on in order to e.g. be notified about important security updates.
- Enable analytics and crash reporting: We use Sentry and Google BigQuery
to collect basic usage data and crash reports.
Note that your time tracking data will never be sent to these services; only general statistics are reported.
Changes to this setting take effect after restarting Timing as well as its tracker app.
You can find more information in our Privacy Policy. - Wrap days at: If your work day stretches past midnight, you'd probably want the time spent after midnight to still count towards the previous day. You can achieve that by changing this setting to e.g. 5am.
- Color scheme for new top-level projects: Gives you the option to have new projects at the "root" level start out with darker colors.
- Color scheme for new child projects: Lets you have child colors inherit their parents' colors, use a similar color, or pick colors from the rainbow.
Other Preferences
For the other preference panes, please have a look at the corresponding documentation topics: