Track your first hours

Your first tracked hours need no setup — sign in to the Windows desktop app, work as you normally would, and watch the time land on your dashboard. This walkthrough takes about two minutes.

Before you start, you’ll need the desktop app installed and a workspace sign-in — see Install on Windows if you haven’t. Time tracking is available on every tier, Freelancer included.

1. 1Launch TimerOS and sign in. The login window becomes the always-on-top timer bar docked at the top of your screen. On your very first sign-in the dashboard opens with a short onboarding wizard — tracking deliberately waits until you’ve finished it.
2. 2Let the bar settle. It reads STARTING... for a few seconds while the first on-device classification runs, then a state label appears — PRODUCTIVE, IDLE, BREAK, OVERTIME, or OFF WORK — beside an HH:MM:SS counter.
3. 3Just work. The label follows what you’re doing: step away past your workspace’s inactivity threshold and it moves to IDLE; return and it flips back. Nothing to press.
4. 4Take a deliberate break. Press the coffee-cup Break button on the bar — the state switches to BREAK and stays there until you press it again to end the break. The button dims during overtime and off-work, where breaks aren’t counted anyway.
5. 5Open the dashboard with the Dashboard button. The home page’s Today’s Hours card shows the time you just tracked, with This Week accumulating beside it.
6. 6For the detailed picture, open Performance in the sidebar: the Time Distribution chart splits your day into per-state minutes, and Performance Metrics shows your productivity rate and hours tracked.

That’s the whole loop: the bar tracks, the dashboard reports. To understand how each second is attributed — and why some of it becomes overtime or off-work — read time states; for how the productive-versus-idle call is made, see activity classification.