- Project. A “bucket” for your time.
Projects are used to categorize your time so you later know how much you worked on any given thing.
Simply assign all activities related to a specific thing you worked on to the same project to count how much time you worked on it.
You can also create subprojects inside other projects to let you organize your projects in a hierarchical fashion.
- App Activity/App Usage. A single timespan where you used a particular file or website in an app, tracked automatically by Timing.
Individual app activities tend to be very short (because we e.g. constantly switch between websites).
Therefore, Timing automatically groups them on the Review screen according to several criteria.
App Activities can be assigned to a project.
Dealing with thousands of small individual app activities is unwieldy, so we can further group up our time into time entries.
- Time Entry. A block of time during which you worked on a particular thing (not necessarily using your computer).
Time entries are added manually, but Timing has several ways to assist you in creating them.
These tend to be from a few minutes to several hours in duration.
If you are familiar with billing your time, time entries often show up on a timesheet.
One example would be a “Write an introductory course” time entry as part of a “Timing” project.
- Filter. Another way of categorizing activities.
While Projects are great for measuring what your worked on, filters let you recap how you worked.
Filters contain exactly the activities matched by their rule, and they can overlap.
You can think of them as a kind of "saved search".
Note that filters are entirely rule-based (you can't manually assign individual activities to them), and thus only contain app usage (not time entries).
- Keywords. Keywords are simply words that Timing automatically extracts from your activities titles and paths.
In many cases activities corresponding to a particular project contain that project's name in their title or path, which makes the project also show up as a keyword.
In that case, you can simply drag the keyword onto the project in the sidebar to add all activities containing that word to the project.
- Rules. Manually assigning activities can be very cumbersome.
Timing's rules feature avoids that by automatically assigning activities that match the rules to specific projects.
- Productivity Score. Gives you a quick estimate of how much you got done and when you are most productive.
Ranges from 0% (very unproductive) to 100% (very productive).
If your productivity score is close to 50%, this indicates that a lot of your activities haven't been assigned to a project or that most of your projects have their productivity score set to the default of 50%.
In that case, you can learn how to assign activities or change your projects' productivity scores.
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