At Sleeplessmind Ltd. we don’t like friction. Actually, who does? When we have a goal in mind, when we want to reach a target, we want to use tools that feel transparent.
That’s the pinnacle of good tools: they’re there, they help us, but they don’t require any overhead. They really do feel transparent.
As soon as it gets too painful to use something, people naturally stop bothering with it. And when they are forced to use something (as it happens in a lot of companies for whatever—usually non valid—reasons), they quickly learn to hate it. Where do you think the bad reputation of Microsoft comes from?
Friction is draining
When we started doing work for our clients at Sleeplessmind Ltd., we had to track time. From all the services available we chose two: Harvest and Toggl (for a great review of Toggl, see Lewis’ article here). We use Harvest for tracking everything that is billable, because they have an integrated invoice system. But we use Toggl for all the rest, because their dashboard is awesome. Again: simple, no overhead.
Now the thing is when you want to start and stop tracking, it can be painful enough that you “forget” to do it.
Or you do it through their web interfaces (a big no no), or you do it from their native apps, but we quickly found that there’s a lot of steps that can be skipped, or done better.
And that’s where Alfred-Time enters the picture.
Alfred and the Alfred-Time workflow
Alfred-Time is a workflow for the Alfred app. Mainly it’s a plugin that allows you to control your time tracking through the Harvest and/or Toggl services with just a keyboard shortcut and a couple of keystrokes.
If you’ve never heard about Alfred, have a look there first: https://www.alfredapp.com/. Alfred is without any doubt the most important piece of software that I have on my Macs. I launch almost everything from it: apps, file searches, reading lists, Macs volume, services, etc, etc…
The core of Alfred is free, but if you want to be able to install workflows you need to buy the powerpack (best investment ever).
Once you have the powerpack, you can just download the plugin on GitHub or Packal (Packal helps you keep your workflows up to date) and import it.
How to use Alfred-Time
Just head to GitHub, everything is explained there with some nice GIFs and all.
Alfred-Time allows you to start, stop, undo, delete, continue, and start timers with predefined projects and tags. All the features work with Toggl, and for the moment only a few work with Harvest. If we have more people using the workflow and needing Harvest, we will start developing the features.
Feel free to fork/pull request on GitHub, or drop a comment below.
Happy tracking!