Author: Mati Roy | Created: 2022-01-11 | Updated: 2022-01-11

How I use Clockify, a timetracking app

I use workspaces for teams with shared time tracking. I have 1 for a few companies, 1 for an intentional community, 1 for my personal contractors outside my companies.

Note about using multiple workspaces:

• Tracking my time in multiple workspaces is a bit annoying because of the time to switch between both and I can’t easily have reports aggregating multiple workspaces.
• I’ll always track my time in my personal workspace even if I also track it somewhere else, but at the lowest level of resolution. Ex.: If I have a workspace for X, then I’ll track that I’m working on X on my personal timetracker while tracking in more details what I’m doing in the workspace for X.
• If teams with whom I’m working don’t really need to see my time tracking, but I need to see theirs (like for my personal contractors), then I’ll keep tracking my time in my personal workspace even if they will track their own time in this shared workspace.

I recently updated my clients to make better use of this level of abstraction. For organizations/people I work a lot for, I have them as a specific client, to which many projects are associated. For organizations/people with whom I only have 1 project, I bundle them under “clients” named by type:

• Contractor: where i put small projects i do for contractors
• Board: i dont currently have this one, but if i was on the board of many org, i would use it

I also bundle some by theme:

• Cryonics: where i put my cryonics projects; the “clients” are “people that will use cryonics” in a way
• Parenting: dating, donor-selection, parenting, tribe selection
• Startups
• Etc.

I also have:

• Tribe
  • project “friends and fam”: for time i intentionally spend hanging out with them
  • project “help”: for small tasks i help people with
• My projects: for my other projects.

One of my "clients" is my body; the projects it has are:

• Exercise
  • each individual activities
  • i separate whether it was performed as part of commuting (ex.: “walking” vs “walking, commute”)
  • i also have tasks for things like “preparing equipment”, but maybe that’s bad if i want to measure when am actually exercising vs planning to; i think i might move this to “health”
• Health
  • those have all been one-of tasks (like buying a full-face mask, buying an air filter, etc.)
• Maintenance
  • current items:
    • cat (ie. taking care of zir)
    • cooking
    • dishes
    • eating
    • groceries
    • house insurance (was one-of)
    • housework
    • laundry
    • shaving
    • shopping (sometimes one-of)
    • shower
    • teeth (ie. brushing)
    • toilet (ie. disposing of bladder and large intestine content)
  • i also recently added “eating+” which means eating and related tasks (like brushing my teeth)
• Relaxing
  • if not task is selected, it just meant i relaxed; for me relaxing generally means i do nothing (or just casucally think), not that i do something fun
  • maybe slept (for when i’m not sure whether i slept)
  • tried to sleep
• Masturbating (sounds funny to call that a project, hahaha XD)
• Sleep

One of my projects is “Consuming time”. This is a catch-all for anything that isn’t an investment in the future. Tasks include things like the title of TV shows and activities I do.

• Masturbating should often go here.

I use tags in 6 ways:

• _approximation
  • end time: if end time was approximated
  • start time: if start time was approximated
  • time: if both start and end time was approximated; possibly also if i didn’t work on this exactly the full time
  • mostly: if i worked like 75-95% of the time on that task/project
• _delegate: to track work that was about delegating work
• _rating
  • to improve: if i thought i could have done this better
    • i dont currently use that one
• _type (more details)
  • gear creation
  • gear execution
  • gear improving
  • homeostasis
  • One-of
• _while
  • I’ll use the description field to say what else I’m working on at the same time*
    • I’ll usually select the project that I value the most as the main one; like, if I do something that would otherwise be “consuming time” but while doing something productive (like eating while watching TV), then I don’t care about tracking this in the “consuming time” project
    • Sometimes I’ll create 2 time-entries if it’s important to track those 2 entries, but I don’t often do that
• people
  • name of the person i was doing the task with

Note: all tags with an underscore would be concatenated with their sub-item; ex. “_type: gear creation”; the purpose being for them to be bundled together in the list

• and the purpose of the underscore is for them to appear at the top of the list

*What I do at a given time can overlap with more than 1 project in various ways. For example:

• watching TV while eating
• doing sport (exercise) with a prospect (dating)
• writing this post because i want to help a friend and because i want to improve my system