Here’s a link to a free tool you can make that can help get you started with time tracking on a Mac with Keyboard Maestro…
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Everyone will differ on this but I have no interest in minutely tracking my work or day. I time-block selectively, get up very early and go to bed early. That is working well. Adding time tracking is just one more thing to take up time, one more app to manage, and potentially another point of added stress. I can see its value for some and in situations where one suspects too much time is being spent on “x” and not enough time on “y” but as a general proposition, I don’t think detailed time tracking is necessary for most, unless of course one is paid for one’s time. 
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Those services do not provide invoices. You could easily make your own or use another service for that, though.
I want to add a second voice to this here.
Even as a PhD student, I need to balance my time between research, teaching, family responsibilities, and so much more. I’m mostly accountable to myself, but if I tell someone that I’m going to have something done by a certain date I find that time tracking helps me better understand whether or not the task was bigger than I expected or whether or not I wasn’t focused on it. This helps me provide more accurate timelines with a completion window bookended by my optimistic estimate and my realistic estimate. Similarly, my teaching contracts are for a set number of hours, so it’s very important for me to keep track of the time I spend on the related tasks.
One question - Can you track time using tags in Timing?
A use case - Meetings may be devoted to different projects - They need to be allocated to the projects, but also under a tag named “Meetings” so you can see how much time you spent a week in a meeting?
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You might look at RescueTime. If you have problems with cloud-based software or subscriptions you’re not going to like it, but it’s (I think) equally good on Mac and PC and has some mobile functionality as well if you want it. The out-of-the-box categorization is smarter than most other time-tracking apps, and if you’re interested in understanding how/when you best focus, it has some good data abstractions to that end. I’ve used it on and off for about a dozen years.
My great time-tracking love, though, is a spreadsheet that automatically color codes itself! I started making them as a distraction from studying, then as a bored intern, then a bored entry-level employee, and I still like them. They’re no good at window-detection but they are the best I’ve ever found for visualizing a week of 10-15 different states and habits that require subjective evaluation.
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I have tried time tracking in the past, but could never seem to remember to start and stop the timers. The features of Timing sound like it might work for me. @MacSparky, do you or @ismh have referral links for Timing?
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Maybe you want to have a look/listening to episode 150 of Focused… 
@MacSparky You mentioned an artist who made the poster for you in the episode. Do you have more information on them because I might want to commission some work too. I LOVE the poster.
I’ve used the free version of Toggl for a few months now, and I’ve had repeated problems with the iOS app not syncing to the web in real time (and vice versa). I actually very quickly abandoned the Mac app as that was even worse so I only persevered with the web and iOS. But, after my first month and my repeated irritation with this I gave up and only use the app on my phone. Even though I’m only using the app on my phone, I still occasionally get an email telling me a timer has been running for over 8 hours, even though I can see on the app that is not the case!! (I ignore this and it’s never caused a problem!) in the year 2022 I can’t say I rate any software highly that promises cross-device use and fails to deliver…
On to my actual usage, I track life generally and I mostly just use really broad categories, just so I have an idea whether I’m working too much, need to spend more time on chores, or whatever. One good thing about Toggl is it prefills previous uses so if like me you basically just cycle through the same 20 activities every week it’s dead easy to turn on and off. Eg i have two employers and I just name the employer, not the actual task I was doing. I have a category called “reading” and I don’t break it down by book, magazine, Pocket, whatever.
I regularly forget to turn the timer off when I switch tasks, but just yesterday I enabled the Toggl widget on the home screen so now I can see without opening the app if a timer is running.
Every Tuesday I go through my previous week and look for anything that needs addressing. Toggl also send a weekly email summary which I store in a DEVONThink database as a pdf on the off chance I feel a desperate urge to study my lifestyle in 20 years (hopefully around the post-apocalyptic campfires we’ll still have working Macs to look back on these fun times 
).
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She was really nice about making the adjustment for me. Here’s the final version that I’ll be getting for the studio. I’m putting the cart before the horse a bit in that I don’t even have approval from the city yet … but I’m an optimist and it is a pretty small build, one room with 1.5 of the four walls already existing.
Also, a few people have asked me about getting their own Endor studios poster and Danielle said she can run more if anyone wants them. If that’s you, you can contact Danielle at sylvandesign.co
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I agree 100%. I’m a director at a university so there’s no sense in tracking time. I don’t need to bill anyone so it’s a futile waste of time. For consultancy, I always have a fixed cost. I’ve never billed by the hour.
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I agree, about half my day is taken up with meetings. The other hours I time block and that is good enough for me to know how I spent my time. I log the time I spend on most projects in my Obsidian DailyNote, something like, spent 2 hours on project x. Or sometimes, just spent time on project y if I don’t care about the amount of time.
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Time tracking is a pipe dream for me, kind of like planning. I have a lot tasks where I kick off a an automated process and I have to wait x minutes to see if it completes successfully.
While I am waiting for that task to complete, I might work on something else on my laptop, leave to do something around the house, etc.
Then I have those tasks where it could take minutes or a few days as I’ve never dinner done it before and part of the task if figuring out how to do it. Usually that is trying to pieces together posts on forums, wiki’s, man pages, etc . There is never a complete answer, so I stitch things together along with some trial and error!
Maybe after my relative new home is setup how I’d like to give some stability, I can plan and time track better.
That is just for personal tasks. Work is even more chaotic as it’s a mix of planned and unplanned work. heck, sometimes it’s a project manager who pops in to interrupt my planned sprint work for a higher priority. Oh, we just found this bug in that software we deployed last week. We need you to roll back a few thousand systems to the previous version. oh , ok. I guess I’ll stop working on my current task then.
I would give Timely (https://timelyapp.com) a look - works on Windows and Mac, and (if you want) it can log your location on an iPhone. It has been great for me. It has a bunch of stuff you can add on for team or project tracking, but I just use the most basic version and it does all I need.
Hee Hee! 
very funny
Update on Syncing with Timery.
I set up Timery app on Monterey - iPhone and iPad.
I also set up a few simple Siri shortcuts to start and stop the timers.
I used use Siri shortcuts on the iPhone to start and stop them.
The results are that it seems as though the three versions of the app do sync (at least while they are Open and visible).
But here is the problem: I set up widgets on the iPhone and for iPad for Timery. These are the problem because they do not seem to update quickly at all - especially if the app is not currently open on the device, so you cannot rely on them.
I also noticed that if I started a timer on one device - and then needed to open the app on the other Device - then I can see that when it opens you see it’s spinning while it is currently syncing - and then it becomes current and so does the widget.
So it seems that this is possibly more related to Apple sync/widgets than the app and maybe we might not rely on the widgets for now.
Hi, I liked this episode and have been inspired to try and track my time. I have Timery and Toggl, but ran into the sand as I kept forgetting to start and stop timers.
If I can automate or simplify starting and stopping timers, I think I can make it work for me, and would definitely appreciate the reality check from time to time to see how much time certain actives actually take!!
I now have a better structure for my timers but I’m having a few problems. I’ve listened to the podcast twice but can’t figure out how David uses shortcuts to launch timers. I think he said he had a shortcut for each saved timer? I imagine I’ll have 12-20 timers when I’m finished to it should be very simple to have a shortcut for each of my saved timers, or the most important ones. I might link it to the stream deck when I get it working.
Does anyone have a shortcut to launch a saved timer? I’ve spent a few hours (must do a training on shortcuts!!) but can’t seem to get it working. If someone has a simple, few steps shortcut they would be willing to share, I can adapt, amend.
Enjoying being part of this community - learning a lot. Thanks all!
From what I understand from the discussion in the episode, David and Stephen talked about how the Shortcuts actions that Timery provides make starting and stopping timers much easier than using Shortcuts to communicate directly with the Toggl API. They discussed how there are really only a limited number of timers that they use to track the broader areas of where they spend their time.
Here is a Shortcut I built to demonstrate how you can use a menu tree to select specific timers to start. I used my part of my own PhD projects/descriptions as an example. Feel free to use it and modify it however you want to.
Additionally, like you said, you can have a single Shortcut to launch a timer and then assign the Shortcut to your Stream Deck. Here is an example of what Stephen was saying about how Timery makes the Shortcut literally become one action.
If you’re using Timery then you first need to make sure that you have the app downloaded on the appropriate device and that you are signed into the app with your Toggl credentials.
I personally find it most helpful to just track everything so that I’m not trying to decide whether or not I should be tracking my time. So I have specific projects, descriptions, and tags for work that requires it, but then I just have generic “family time” and “sleep” projects for when I’m not actively concerned about how I spend my time so that I don’t need to worry about stoping a timer. If I’m curious later then I can also compare more specifically how I spend my work-life-sleep balance.
Finally, for anyone else that might be interested. Federico Viticci has publicly available Shortcuts in his Shortcuts Archive for time tracking with Toggl using the API directly (which is what I do).
Hopefully this is helpful for you.
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