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 there, TimerOS attributes every second to an activity state on your device, and your dashboard fills in as the day goes on.

After you sign in to the desktop app, the main window becomes a small always-on-top timer bar docked at the top of your screen (about 400px wide × 40px tall, auto-sized to fit the activity label). It shows your tracking-mode glyph, your current activity label, an HH:MM:SS elapsed counter, and four buttons: Break, Dashboard, Collapse, and Logout. The timer bar is the only surface that tracks time — leave it running while you work.

How intervals get labelled

A background monitor checks your foreground app and window every five seconds and classifies it on-device. A scored rule engine decides first; if it isn’t confident, a small on-device model decides; and your employer’s rules can override both. The output is a simple productive or idle decision. No window titles leave your device, and there’s no cloud AI. See how classification works for the full picture.

From there, your monitor decides break versus idle, and applies your shift hours: when you’re inside your shift, productive and idle stay as-is; when you’re outside it, productive becomes overtime and idle/break become off-work (off-work is never counted). Read more in time states.

  • Break vs idle: stepping away triggers idle, then break, after the workspace inactivity thresholds. Press the coffee-icon Break button to declare a deliberate break that input won’t end until you resume.
  • Lock: locking your workstation (Win+L) switches active states immediately — to break inside your shift, or to off-work outside it.
  • Sleep: if your machine sleeps, the gap is credited as break (in shift) or off-work (outside shift), not your pre-sleep state.

Review and correct in the dashboard

Open the dashboard from the timer bar. The home card shows worked time (productive + overtime), and the Performance page breaks the day into per-state totals with charts and a productivity percentage. To fix a label in Automatic mode, go to Settings → Activity Detection, find the live Current Activity card, and choose Mark as productive or Mark as idle; the on-device model retrains right away from that correction.

Per-device tracking
Time is tracked by the timer bar on the device you’re working on. If your connection drops, the day’s hours are kept locally and sync automatically once the connection returns — or on your next launch, if you closed the app while offline. An amber dot on the timer bar shows when the API is unreachable. Changing your tracking mode is reserved for managers and above.