Concepts

Projects and tasks

Swipetimes tracks the time you spend with projects. More granular tracking may be achieved by dividing a project into tasks.

Juice company     ⇠ Project
  Meetings        ⇠ Task
  Marketing       ⇠ Task

When you start Swipetimes for the first time, it will display two “demo” projects, so you can immediately start playing with the app. They will however vanish as soon as you define the real-life projects you want to track.

Goals

You may define two types of goals:

  1. Project goals: you define a time goal for a project and get notified when you achieve that goal (or a given percentage of the goal).
  2. Global goals: you define a target time for each of the week’s days. The daily tracked time is compared with the defined target. The difference is added or removed from your time account.

Profiles

Profiles group projects together.

They have a double role: as only one profile can be active at a given time, the only projects visible in the app will be the active profile’s ones. Thus, they help reducing the clutter.

The other use of profiles comes to play in conjunction with global goals. Let’s assume you track your work time in Swipetimes and define a weekly goal of 40 hours. Everything works fine as long as you track only your work related projects. But now you’d like to also track a private project. Adding this project’s records to your tracked time would mess up the 40 hours worktime goal calculations. The solution to this problem is to move your private project to another profile:

Project Profile
Design Work
Customer support Work
Hobbies Private

Your Work profile has a goal of 40 hours, the Private profile may or may not have a goal. By using this setup, only Design and Customer support records will affect the 40 hours goal calculations for the Work profile. Problem solved.

Tags

Tagging is a simple mechanism to mark the tracked records independently of their project.

Project Time Tags Duration
Juice company 10:10
10:15		 Paperwork, Homeoffice 5 minutes
Wine company 10:15
10:20		 Computer, Homeoffice 5 minutes
Water company 10:20
10:30		 Computer, Homeoffice 10 minutes

In the example above each of the records belongs to a different project. However, all of them are marked with the Homeoffice tag, resulting in 20 minutes of Homeoffice activities. Computer work was done for 15 minutes, and Paperwork for 5.

Start center


The start center is the part of the app you'll be using most of the time. It's the place you start and stop the tracking, add notes, edit today's records, take a quick look at statistics etc. It's divided in multiple sections which are described below. ## Project screen {#st-cen-project-screen} Displays all projects (from the current profile) which are currently trackable.



  • 1 and 2 are the projects you may track. A tap on one of them will start the timer.
  • 3 displays the project’s tracked time:
    • the first line -∑- shows the project’s total tracked time
    • the second line -🏁- is displayed only if the project has a goal and shows the current goal’s tracked time
  • 4 gives you the possibility to reorder the projects displayed in the start center

Once running, a timer and controls to adjust the currently tracked record are displayed.



Tapping on the time 1 allows you to adjust the start time of the currently tracked project.
A control bar 2 gives you the possibility to:

  1. stop the timer
  2. start a break
  3. decrease the start time with one minute
  4. decrease the start time with five minutes
  5. add notes and tags

Today

The Today tab displays the current day’s records. You may interact with the cards and change times, notes, tags and even projects.

Quick stats

Quick stats offers some insights over your time tracking habits.


The tracked time card 1 displays today’s, this and previous week’s tracked time. It also compares those times with the goals and shows a thumb up if the goal has been reached and down if not. Thumbs are only shown if goals are set-up.

The time account card 2 shows the current value of your time account. This value is computed by subtracting the goals from the tracked time. If you have a weekly goal of 40 hours, and at the end of the week you’ve tracked 42 hours your time account will be 2 hours.

The small chart below the time account 3 compares the daily goal with the tracked time for the last two weeks.