Getting started

Track your first day

Your first tracked day starts once you’ve finished the short onboarding wizard and the timer bar is running. From then on, TimerOS assigns every second an activity state, right on your device, and your dashboard fills in as the day goes on.

After you sign in to the desktop app, the main window turns into a small timer bar at the top of your screen. It stays on top of other windows and is about 400px wide × 40px tall (the width adjusts to the activity label). It shows your tracking-mode icon, your current activity label, an HH:MM:SS counter and four buttons: Break, Dashboard, Collapse and Logout. Only the timer bar tracks time, so leave it running while you work.

How your time is labelled

Every five seconds, the app checks which program and window you are using and classifies them on your device. A set of scored rules decides first. If it isn’t sure, a small on-device model decides. Your employer’s rules can override both. The result is either productive or idle. No window titles leave your device, and no cloud AI is used. See how classification works for details.

Next, the app tells break apart from idle and applies your shift hours. Inside your shift, productive and idle stay as they are. Outside it, productive becomes overtime, and idle and break become off-work, which is never counted. Read more in time states.

  • Break vs idle: when you step away, your state changes to idle and later to break, at the inactivity limits your workspace has set. To take a break on purpose, press the Break button (coffee icon). Typing or moving the mouse won’t end it; the break lasts until you press Break again.
  • Lock: locking your computer (Win+L) changes your state right away: to break inside your shift, or to off-work outside it.
  • Sleep: if your computer goes to sleep, that time counts as break (inside your shift) or off-work (outside it), not as the state you were in before.

Review and correct in the dashboard

Open the dashboard from the timer bar. The home card shows your worked time (productive + overtime). The Performance page breaks the day down by state, with charts and a productivity percentage. To fix a label in Automatic mode, go to Settings → Activity Detection, find the Current Activity card and, next to “Wrong?”, choose Productive or Idle. The on-device model learns from the correction right away.

Per-device tracking
Time is tracked by the timer bar on the computer you are working on. An amber dot on the timer bar means TimerOS can’t reach the server. While you are offline, the day’s hours are saved on your computer and sync when the connection returns, or the next time you start the app if you closed it while offline. You choose your own tracking mode in Settings → Activity Detection.