Using DEVONthink with Timing

Time tracking is for most people not subject to entertainment tax but if you’re working as a freelancer then you just have to do it. The Mac application Timing takes at least some of the pain out of it by automatically recording which applications you work with or which web sites you visit. Starting with Timing 2019.3 it also captures which DEVONthink databases, groups, or documents you use and how long.

P.S. We’ve talked to the Timing people, and if you find it useful you as our customer get 10% off your first subscription period.

Working with Timing and DEVONthink

Timing categorizes what it has captured and assigns it to projects using rules. It comes with a set of built-in rules but also lets you set up your own. This can be very broad, like “Web Browsing” or “Work”, or very specific, like “Client X” or “Customer Support”.

Let’s assume you have set up a database for your research projects, with individual groups per project. At the end of the day visit Timing’s Review tab and set up your categories (“projects” in Timing parlance). Then drag the times you have worked in each of these groups in DEVONthink to the projects they belong to.

But that’s still tedious and manual. Drag the entries from the Path pane with the Option key held to a project. This not only adds the time block but also makes it a rule. From now on every time you work in that group or with that document in DEVONthink the time you spent on it will be automatically assigned to that project.

Timing places the names of DEVONthink databases and groups into the “file path” property of the recorded time block. Check a project’s settings and you’ll know how they look like. Fine-tune the rules to your liking or add even complex ones manually.

Like DEVONthink, Timing is available with three increasingly powerful feature sets from the Timing website or with a Setapp subscription.

As our customer get Timing for an exclusive discount of 10% off on the first subscription period. Visit the Timing website from here and get your exclusive discount applied automatically.