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Timers

Herding Cats allows you a simple form of time-tracking, so you can record what you were working on when, and how long you spend in total on different tasks. If timers aren’t useful for you, or don’t make sense in your workflow, you can turn them off in the settings.

Starting and stopping timers

Start a timer from a task detail page by clicking the “play” icon.

A button with a play icon, which starts the timer for a taskA button with a play icon, which starts the timer for a task
The “start timer” button on a task detail page

You can start a timer on any incomplete task at any time. If you’ve already got a timer running, starting the timer on a new task will automatically stop the other timer.

You can also stop a timer manually from the task detail page, by clicking the “stop” icon.

The timer banner

On most pages, you will see a persistent banner telling you what, if any, timer you currently have running. The banner will be a different colour depending on whether you have an active timer or not.

If you have a timer running, clicking the banner will take you to the details page of the task you’re currently working on. The banner will tell you what time you started working on that task.

Seeing the time you’ve tracked

Individual task pages

On the details page for a task, you can see the total time you’ve tracked on that task, and all the work sessions where you were tracking time in the “Activity” section. This doesn’t include time from the timer you’re currently running.

The Activity Log page

You can see all the time you’ve tracked per day on the activity logs page, as well as all the individual work sessions where you were tracking time.

The exported report

When you export a report for a week, this includes the time tracked in that week on each task you touched that week.

Editing timers

If you forget to start or stop a timer, you can edit it from the Activity Logs page. Edit a timer from either its start or stop entry in the activity log, by clicking the pencil icon next to the timestamp. The edit dialog allows you to change the start and end times and dates, just in case you left a timer running overnight.