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timemellow is a small, calm time tracker. You log durations, never clock times — an entry says “2h 30m on the website”, not “9:14 to 11:44”. No timesheet theatre, and honest about days where things overlap. It’s built for billable work and personal tracking alike: exercise, meditation and reading log, exactly the same way client projects do.

Everything below works in the free version, in a single browser, with no account. The Sync plan adds your account on every device, automatic backups, and email overviews.

Getting started

Time is organised in three levels: Clients / Projects / Areas. A freelance setup might be Acme → Website → Design; a personal one Life → Health → Running. If those words don’t fit your world, rename them — Settings lets you call the levels anything (Life / Goal / Activity works just as well), and every screen, report and export follows your wording. The plural is guessed for you and editable too, for the times English has its own ideas (Life → Lives).

The first time you open timemellow it walks you through creating your first client, project and areas. Prefer to poke around first? Load the sample data and delete it later — nothing about it is special.

Logging time

The Track page is home: the entry form at the top, your day’s log beneath it, and a summary of the week, fortnight, month or any period above — the fortnight shows this week and last together, handy early in a week.

Task — what you did. Add #tags anywhere in the text (Sprint review #meetings); they become filterable chips, with autocomplete once you’ve used a tag before.
Duration — type it how you think it: 1h 30m, 45m, or 1.5. The two quick-add buttons bump time in steps you choose (15 minutes and 1 hour by default). Durations snap to your rounding setting — 15 minutes out of the box, adjustable from 1 to 60 in Settings.
Timer — press ▶ and get on with it. The timer runs across tabs, survives refreshes, and stays visible even with the form collapsed; stopping it fills the duration for you. While the timer runs, the browser tab shows what you’re timing — ● 0:42 · Acme › Website — so a glance at the tab strip answers “am I still on the clock, and on what?”. The eye button beside the running timer hides the client and project for that run (sharing your screen, say), and Settings can turn the detail off for good.
Already put some time in? Type the duration first and the Timer button becomes Start at 30:00 — the clock opens at what you’ve entered and counts on from there, so “half an hour on this already, and I’m carrying on” is one entry rather than two. Stopping fills the total.
Jumping back on a task — edit one of today’s entries and the Timer button becomes Continue: the timer picks up from the time already logged and keeps counting, so a task you return to three times stays one honest entry, not three. When the entry was timed (rather than typed), it continues from the exact measured time underneath the rounded value — repeated returns never inflate the total through rounding. Typing a duration by hand makes that value the confirmed time. Entries from other days don’t offer the timer at all — timing now belongs to today, so duplicate an old task into a fresh entry instead.
Link — paste a URL to anything (a ticket, a doc, a commit). Known tools get their icon on the entry row; everything else gets a neat link glyph.
Note — optional details, kept out of the way until you expand them.
Half-built entries keep — the form holds whatever you’ve set up while you hop to Manage or Reports and back (timer running or not), and survives a refresh. Clear resets it when you want a fresh start.

On the day log you can edit, duplicate (yesterday’s entry again, one click), delete, and reorder entries within a day — drag on desktop, nudge arrows on touch.

Prefer tighter rows? The Compact entries switch above the log keeps every entry to two lines: notes tuck behind a small chip beside the entry’s buttons — click one to peek at that note — and the sub-tasks chip moves up there too. Flick it off to see everything in full again. And in All time, the log shows the most recent stretch of days with a Show earlier days button to keep going — the totals above always cover everything.

Mixing work and life in one log? Mark a client as a personal context (its ⚙ settings in Manage) and an Exclude personal switch appears beside Compact entries. Flick it on to see just the work: the summary total, the log, copy day and the CSV download all leave personal entries out. Nothing is hidden quietly — the summary says how many hours are excluded and each affected day says how many entries it’s hiding — and nothing is ever deleted: flick the switch off and everything is back. It stays where you set it, so you might turn it off for the weekend and on again Monday. Reports don’t have the switch — filters and saved views already cover it there.

Favourites — templates for the things you log again and again

Star an entry and it’s saved as a favourite: a filled template you can load into the form with one click, dated today.

A favourite is its own copy, not a shortcut back to the entry. Open Favourites (F, or the Fav button in the form’s header) and the pencil opens each one for editing: rename it, set the duration it usually takes, and clear the note or link that only applied to the day you starred it. None of that touches the original entry, and a favourite stays put even if you later delete the entry it came from. Reorder them by dragging (nudge arrows on touch), and ✕ removes one.

Sub tasks — the pieces inside an entry

Some entries are one small thing; others are a morning’s job with several finished pieces inside it. Sub tasks keep that breakdown out of the note: the Sub tasks button under the entry form opens a small list — type a line, press Enter, repeat. Each line records a piece of completed work, so there are no checkboxes to manage: if it’s listed, it’s done, and the task field stays a headline while the note stays a summary. Edit a line with the pencil, delete with ✕, reorder by dragging (nudge arrows on touch).

Already have the list written down somewhere? Paste it straight in — paste several lines into the box and each becomes its own sub task, with any bullets or numbering stripped off. Ten at a time; paste again for the rest.

Entries with sub tasks show a small list icon and count on the day log — click it to see or change them, and copy at the bottom of the list puts just those sub tasks on the clipboard as plain - bullets. Day copies include sub tasks as indented bullets under the entry, and CSV downloads carry them in their own column, so a standup paste or an export tells the whole story without a bloated note.

Quick add — typing entries as text

If you’d rather type than click, Quick add (the button in the form’s header, or Q) takes entries as lines of text — one per line, so a forgotten afternoon goes in all at once:

45m timemellow web / docs / content — docs pass #ai
1h acme / site — design review

A line is a duration, then the path, then the task after a dash (—, –, -- or | all work). The rules are forgiving:

Duration first, in any form the entry form accepts: 45m, 1h 30m, 1.5h, 1.5.
Path is client / project / area, and you can stop early: leave off the area, or the project too, and it fills in the first one — exactly what the dropdowns would have preselected.
Short names work as long as they’re unambiguous, so tim / doc / con finds Timemellow web / Docs / Content. If a name could mean two things, that line tells you which two instead of guessing.
Forgotten what’s in there? The chips under the box always list what fits where you’re typing — your clients, then that client’s projects, then that project’s areas — and clicking one drops it into the line. Typing / is the “remind me” gesture: a line ending in a slash waits and asks which one you meant rather than quietly taking the default. A name that matches nothing tells you the ones that would have.
Tab accepts the match. When what you’ve typed can only mean one thing — 45m ti, or a slot with a single option left — Tab fills in the full name and moves you along, separator included. A whole line can be a few letters and a few Tabs. When it could mean two things, Tab does nothing and the chips show you both.
#tags stay in the task, and a pasted URL moves itself to the Link field.
Everything lands on the one date at the top of the box, so yesterday’s catch-up is one change, not one per line.

Nothing is written until you press Add, and the preview underneath shows exactly what you’ll get. Lines you haven’t finished typing sit quietly; lines that don’t make sense say why and wait behind for you to fix them — they’re never dropped, and never invent a client or project you haven’t created. For a single line, Open in form hands it to the entry form instead, ready for a note or a tweak.

Scrapbook timers — side timers for messy moments

One timer is usually right — but some mornings are a desk interruption on top of a call on top of the thing you were actually doing. Scrapbook timers (in the user menu, the command palette, or !) are extra timers you can run alongside the main one, as many as you like, with just a note — no client or project needed yet. If there are notes you start again and again (“Coffee break”, “Ad-hoc call”), add them as defaults in Settings and they become one-tap chips at the top of the scrapbook.

A running scrapbook timer can be paused and resumed — handy when the interruption itself gets interrupted. Paused time doesn’t count: the session you eventually keep is only the time the timer actually ran.

Stopping one keeps the session — a note, a duration, a day — in the scrapbook, not in your log. Sessions keep their honest length to the minute (“3m”, “6m”); your duration-rounding setting only applies when one becomes a real entry. Scrapbook time never appears in reports until you decide what it was:

File it fills the entry form with the note, duration (snapped to your rounding setting) and day; pick a client and project, save, and the session becomes a normal entry (and leaves the scrapbook).
Again starts a fresh timer with the same note — every stop keeps its own session, so four coffee breaks are four honest sessions until you file or delete them.
The ✎ pencil fixes up a session’s note — and its duration, for the timer you forgot to stop: a 39m session you know was really 5m takes any duration the entry form would (5m, 1h 5m), kept to the minute.
Delete is a perfectly good ending too. Timed it out of curiosity? Bin it, no ceremony.

A small counter floats in the bottom-right corner on every page: violet and ticking while scrapbook timers run, a quiet count while kept sessions wait to be filed — click it to get back to your timers. Running timers live on this device; kept sessions are part of your data like everything else, so they export, import and sync. The main timer doesn’t change at all.

Copy day puts a clean plain-text summary of any day on your clipboard — tasks, projects, durations and total — formatted to paste straight into a standup message or an email. The format is stable, so habits built on it keep working. Beside it, download saves the same day as a CSV — identical columns to the reports export, just scoped to one day. And a small secret: the colour dot at the start of each entry row is a copy button too — click it to put just that one entry on the clipboard, in the same format.

Keeping things tidy — Manage

The Manage page is your timemellow’s admin: rename anything, reorder lists, recolour projects (a 16-colour palette, a “pick for me” button, or any custom colour), and set each area’s shade within its project’s hue.

Statuses keep old work out of the way without touching history: active appears everywhere, done disappears from the entry form but stays in reports (with a ✓ in Manage), archived hides everywhere while its logged hours still count.

The Recycle bin

The fourth status, recycled, is for things you wish you’d never created — test clients, abandoned experiments. Picking it asks you to confirm first, since a client or project takes everything under it along; the item then leaves the Manage pages and every dropdown entirely, though any hours logged against it still count in reports, under its real name. Recycled items live in the Recycle bin (Settings → Your data, or the link under the Manage list), where you can restore one — it comes back as Archived, ready to reactivate; if the client or project it belongs to is also in the bin, the bin asks you to restore that first — or delete it forever. Deleting is only offered while no entries or favourites reference the item, so history can never lose its names: recycle something referenced and the bin simply shows what’s holding it in place.

Three quieter features: give any area a lifetime estimate (an hours budget the Estimates report tracks); tick hide name on a client — useful for a “Personal” client whose name would just be noise on every entry line and day copy; and mark a client as a personal context (also in its ⚙ settings), which gives the Track page its Exclude personal switch. The two client flags are independent — one hides the name, the other says what the time is.

Reports

Reports › Activity shows any date range as a donut by project, a weekly trend, daily bars and totals by client, project, area, task and tag — filterable by any mix of clients, projects, areas and tags. A view you keep coming back to can be saved: set the filters, hit Save view…, name it (“Yearly AI work — Acme”), and it becomes a chip above the filters — one click brings the whole view back, and each saved view is also a command in the palette. When your dates match a quick range like This year or This month, a checkbox lets the saved dates follow that span — so a yearly view still means this year next January — or stay as the exact dates you picked. There’s no editing a saved view: load it, tweak, save it as a new one, and remove the old with its ×. Narrow the range to a single day (Today, Yesterday, or matching From and To dates) and the daily bars make way for This day, compared — the day against your average for that weekday and your average day overall, counted over days you actually logged in the previous twelve weeks. Reports › Estimates tracks every area with a budget: hours logged, hours left, quietly flagged when one goes over. Any view exports to CSV with your renamed labels as the headers.

Rates & money

Off by default, and invisible until you want it — timemellow never assumes your time is billable. When it is: Settings → Money, pick a currency, and the Rates switch unlocks.

Set an hourly rate in any client’s ⚙ settings in Manage; a project’s own ⚙ settings can override its client’s rate. Leave a rate blank and that work simply isn’t billable.
Every entry remembers the rate at the moment you logged it — changing a rate later never rewrites what past work was worth. (Moving an entry to a different client or project re-prices it at the destination’s rate, since that’s a new pricing decision.)
Money shows in Reports: an earned figure beside the totals, a column on the project breakdown, and Rate/Amount columns in the CSV export — only for work that actually has a rate. A separate switch adds an earned total to the Track summary if you like seeing it as you go.
One currency for the whole workspace, display only — no conversion, and money never appears in day copies or email overviews.

Turning Rates off hides all of it without deleting anything; switch back on and it’s exactly as you left it.

Keyboard shortcuts

Press ? in the app for this list any time.

Key	Does
`⌘K` / `CtrlK`	Command palette — type to jump anywhere or run anything
`T`	Track
`R`	Reports
`E`	Reports › Estimates
`M`	Manage
`S`	Settings
`N`	New entry
`Q`	Quick add — type entries as text
`F`	Favourites
`C`	Compact entries on / off (on Track)
`.`	Start / stop the timer, from anywhere
`!`	Scrapbook timers
`Esc`	Close whatever’s open — the topmost panel first

Shortcuts stay out of the way while you’re typing.

Your data

Export everything, any time, on any plan. One button in Settings downloads your complete data — entries, setup and settings — as a single JSON file. Import, alongside it in Settings, brings it back whole: moving browsers, restoring a backup, or just keeping your own copies. This is never gated and never will be.

On the free plan your data lives in your browser only — simple, private, and tied to the device, so a regular export is your backup habit (the app will nudge you gently if it’s been a while). Sync is the resilience story below.

Resetting everything requires downloading an export first, then typing a confirmation phrase — a wipe you can always undo by importing the file it just made you save.

Usage analytics — and turning them off

Settings › Privacy has a switch for usage analytics, on by default. While it’s on we count page visits and a handful of feature events (an entry saved, an export run) so we can see what’s actually used. Never your entries, names, notes, links, durations or money — the analytics are self-hosted and cookieless, and nothing is sold or shared.

Turn the switch off and nothing is loaded and nothing is sent from that point on. The choice is per browser, so it isn’t carried between your devices by Sync. If your browser sends the Global Privacy Control signal we follow it automatically — the switch shows off and stays off.

The marketing site keeps its own separate switch, on its cookie policy page.

The Sync plan

Sync adds an account so your time can follow you:

Every device — sign in anywhere and your entries are there. Changes made offline queue up and reconcile when you’re back: entries logged on two devices merge together, and deletions are respected. Nothing gets lost to a sync conflict.
Automatic backups — beyond your own exports: your last ten saves are kept as restorable versions, a daily snapshot is kept for two weeks. The Backups screen lists them, and Preview shows what’s inside any copy — headline counts that open into the actual names, its latest changes (marked where they differ from your current data) and its latest entries — so you can pick the right restore point instead of guessing. Restoring is two clicks. Everything is encrypted in transit and at rest.
Named backups — pin up to five copies yourself, each with a name (“Before the big reorganisation”) and no expiry: they stay until you delete them. Saved with one click from the same Backups screen, with the same preview and two-click restore.
Email overviews — an optional daily, weekly or monthly summary of what you logged, arriving in the morning in your timezone. Only sent when there’s something logged — an empty day sends nothing. Every email has a one-click unsubscribe.

Billing is handled by Paddle, our payment partner — receipts and invoices arrive from them, and Manage billing in the app opens your portal for payment details, invoices or cancelling. If your subscription lapses, nothing is locked away: you choose between restarting Sync or continuing free on the device you use — your latest data moves into that browser and everything keeps working locally. Your data stays readable and exportable, always, and if you restart Sync later, time logged meanwhile can come with you.

Working offline & installing

timemellow works offline. The app loads without a connection, everything you log is saved locally, and (on Sync) it catches up on its own when you’re back online. You can install it like an app — your browser will offer “Install” on desktop and Android, or use Add to Home Screen on iOS — for a clean window and an icon of its own. When a new version ships, the app tells you and updates on your next refresh, never mid-session.

Missing features?

Stuck, or wishing timemellow did something it doesn’t? We’d genuinely like to hear — there’s a message box at the bottom of Settings for Sync users, or email us any time.