Track your first hours

Tracking your first hours needs no setup beyond a short onboarding wizard. Sign in to the Windows desktop app, work as usual, and watch the time appear on your dashboard. It takes about two minutes.

Before you start, install the desktop app (see Install on Windows) and make sure you can sign in to your workspace. Time tracking is on every plan, including Freelancer.

1. 1Start TimerOS and sign in. The login window turns into the timer bar at the top of your screen. On your first sign-in, the dashboard opens with a short onboarding wizard. Tracking starts only after you finish it.
2. 2Wait a few seconds. The bar shows STARTING... while it classifies your activity for the first time. Then a state label appears next to an HH:MM:SS counter: PRODUCTIVE, IDLE, BREAK, OVERTIME or OFF WORK.
3. 3Work as usual. The label follows what you do. If you are away longer than your workspace’s inactivity limit, it changes to IDLE. When you come back, it changes back. You don’t need to press anything.
4. 4Take a break. Press the Break button (coffee cup) on the bar. The state changes to BREAK and stays there until you press the button again. The button is dimmed during overtime and off-work, because breaks aren’t counted then.
5. 5Open the dashboard with the Dashboard button. The Today’s Hours card on the home page shows the time you just tracked, and the This Week card next to it shows the total for the week.
6. 6For more detail, open Performance in the sidebar. The Time Distribution chart splits your day into minutes per state, and Performance Metrics shows your productivity rate and hours tracked.

Time states explains how each second gets a state and why some time becomes overtime or off-work. Activity classification covers how TimerOS tells productive time from idle.