Photoshop User - USA (2019-08)

Company: Timeular

Price: $99–$348 for the Tracker and Accessories

Rating: 3.5

Hot: Desk tracker design; ease of use; good

insight with Pro subscription

Not: Very basic time usage insight with Basic

package; no integration with calendar app

in Basic subscription; no export

Time-tracking with a

Physical Tracker Device

Timeular

The Bluetooth desk accessory of the Timeular task-tracking solu-

tion communicates with your Mac to track the time you spend on

tasks and promises to make time tracking more efficient and fun.

The company that developed the Timeular device thinks you’re

best off with an octagonal desk accessory that you place on one of

its sides to start tracking one of the eight possible tasks. My own

experience with the device is that it works as advertised, but that

it doesn’t make tracking time much more efficient. It’s just as easy

to forget to turn it on as with an app and, in some cases (on my

desk anyway), the device just gets in the way. To compensate for

your forgetfulness, though, there is a start-of-day reminder and a

reminder after a number of user-definable minutes that you can

set, but that still assumes you’ll sometimes need to intervene.

Timeular requires you to subscribe to one of three levels: Basic

works in limited feature mode and you pay for the Tracker and

accessories, then it’s a free monthly subscription. The Pro level

offers data export and, more importantly, integration with a few

other apps. Six months after the initial cost, you’ll be billed a $9

monthly subscription payment for this level. Lifetime Pro has all

the Pro features and you make only one initial payment, with no

recurring costs.

The app logs you into the company’s servers, where most of the

data analysis that tells you how you spend your time takes place.

This is a European firm and I’m sure they’re extremely careful with

your data, but some people will still be wary of sharing tracking

data with others. You should at the very least be able to export

data to a CSV-file locally.

The integration, even with your desktop calendar app, depends

on a subscription of at least $9/month on a yearly basis. Without

integration, the system is very limited in its abilities to give insight

into your working day. n

Review by Erik Vlietinck

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