Timeular: the tech piece that tracks your time while working from home
An eight-sided polyhedron has been crucial to helping me manage the way I work from home. Here’s how you can put it to good use yourself.
I’ve been using a small polyhedron with eight sides to analyse the way I work from home. This little octahedron isn’t a digital form of pyramid power with mysterious forces watching every action online but an electronic device called Timeular, which you pair with your computer – typically a home PC or Mac – or a phone or tablet.
The device is a way to monitor how I use my time, in the same way that screen-monitoring apps can demonstrate time spent on devices. It’s easy in lockdown to lose track of time, or work long hours. It’s also useful to review time spent on different work actions and make adjustments to improve productivity.
Time management is essential if you operate a business that bills by time, such as lawyers typically do, or even if you want to track your working time for tax purposes, such as when claiming home office use.
With Timeular, you decide on eight different activities you want to track and assign a side of the octahedron. As a journalist I chose writing, blogging, email, production, phone calls, social media, research, and other work activities.
Timeular comes with sheets of stickers; you choose a design that best reflects the activity you are tracking and stick it on. Installation is straightforward: Timeular has downloads for Windows, MacOS, iOS, Android and Linux.
You install the software, pair it with your Timeular and input your activities. You are good to go.
As I swap from email, to writing, research, or production, I turn the Timeular to the face that shows that activity. If someone calls on the phone, it takes me a millisecond to turn the Timeular over to track the call duration. It’s a habit I get into – very simple. Timeular comes with a small base you place the octahedron in when you are downing tools. Tracking stops.
Timeular is far from being alone in this space. A mountain of software-based time management systems has been available for years.
Many time management packages track the time you spend for individual clients, track for teams and consolidate the time spent on each aspect of a project by each team member. Packages interface with billing/invoicing systems.
Some time management apps have a tracking browser plug in; you click on the module icon at the top of your browser to start, stop and swap between tasks. Some of these are free.
Professional time tracking software Actitime, TrackingTime, Clockify and Elorus offer browser extensions. If you want basic free tracking software, try the Simple Time Tracker.
You might ask why bother with an octahedron when you can use a few mouse clicks to have your computer directly time you for free? The folks behind Timeular hope that you find the tactile experience of rotating the octahedron between tasks intuitive and that it becomes a habit.
That has happened to me and I find it second nature. It’s not hard to achieve to-the-minute accuracy time tracking. If it weren’t for that, there would be no purpose for using a Timeular. You can press Ctrl-E (or Cmd-E on Macs) to invoke a popup to change activities without the octahedron.
Timeular isn’t a new product, but it’s gone through several revisions which have improved its capabilities. The paid version of Timeular tracks and analyses a team’s time data using its shared spaces feature, and it connects to apps with Zapier, a fascinating application that lets you link other programs and automate workflows.
Timeular offers the example of linking its software with Google Sheets so that each activity (called a zap) you track is added to a Sheets spreadsheet. Other integrations include Google Calendar, Slack, and Philips Hue home automation. You can automatically time track a wide range of actions if you want.
For this you need some programming skills, as things can become complex, but this makes the Timeular system flexible.
Timeular also has added a ‘QuickTrack’ feature. You can add an unlimited number of actions if eight is not enough. However you use Ctrl-E/Cmd-E to start the timing. Octahedrons don’t have unlimited sides. In the end, I found the weekly chart of activities that Timeular spits out useful.
A Timeular octahedron costs $US89 ($121) and the company offers unlimited time tracking and use of desktop and mobile apps for free. A paid annual subscription costs $US129 ($176). It adds charts and reports for time entries, team time tracking collaboration, goal tracking and priority support.
The octahedron is backed with some sophisticated software, but you mightn’t need much of it if your needs are simple.
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