Scirocco Take a Break Timer
There are so many benefits to tracking your time as a part of your workday. So, in this video, I'm gonna share with you three of my favorites. (logo whooshing)
Now, the first timer we're gonna take a look at today is called the Scirocco Take a Break timer. Now, it may be the simplest one on this list, but it can be very effective to help you with your focus.
The idea of the Take a Break timer is for you to set a desired time, hit the start button, and then have it minimized to your desk tray so that you can focus on the work in front of you. Then, when that timer is up, it will re-present itself and overlay itself, no matter what dialogue you are having open, or what you are working on, so that you can reevaluate and decide what you'd like to do next.
Now, the features may seem relatively simple at this stage, but you can actually customize quite a bit of it if you like. Let me just show you a quick example here.
So, let's say I'm gonna work for as little as 10 seconds. I know that's not realistic, but I just wanna show you this as part of this example.
So, you can set in any time that you like and then hit the start button. I can now minimize it, and you can see there's a little green light here telling me that the timer is running.
Now, I can go about my day and work on my most important task, but when the timer is up, I will be presented with this dialogue saying that, hey, I should probably take a break at this time. Now, I can choose to Remind Later.
And I've set it for a default of two minutes, but you can customize that where you can select Take a Break. And what that's going to do is going to set up another time, which you can customize as to how long you would take a break for, whether you walk away from your desk, or maybe just pay attention to something else at your workstation.
If we hit stop, we can go back and stop the timer and come back here and adjust those settings. Now, as I said, you do actually have quite a few options available to you.
So, you can customize your default time, your snooze time as I mentioned there. You can even limit your snooze count if you want.
You can even adjust the types of icons that would appear in the tray down below, and things such as sounds or no sounds. I know it sounds and looks very, very basic, but you know what, for what it needs to do, I've been very impressed with the Take a Break timer.
Toggl Track
Now, number two on our list is a timer called Toggl Track, or formerly known as just Toggl, that's T, O, G, G, L. And here, we're taking a look at a brief summary of my work week so far, but what I use most often is the desktop dialogue, which just allows me to start or stop the timer at any given day.
Now, recently, I've been using Toggl to minimize, try to minimize how many work hours I do in a particular day. So, this is really helpful for me, and if I need to, I can add further details.
But if I log in to the Toggl Summary here, I can get a variety of different reports. So, here's my workweek so far this week, but if I wanna go back and see what I did last week, I can do so and drill down and see my summary.
See some trending over time as well. For example, one of my goals has been to limit the amount of work I do to a maximum of four hours.
And here you can see so far, I've been doing a relatively good job, just staying below, razor thin below this bar below. Now, you can also add things such as tags or projects.
So, if you want to filter things by the different projects that you're working on, you can do so. You can have other further insights as well if you upgrade to their Premium or Enterprise plans.
What I like about Toggl is that it's very easy to initiate, to start and stop as a part of my day, but you can use some of the more complex features if you wish.
TMetric
Last but not least, if you want some more advanced features when it comes to time tracking, either for yourself or for members of your team, you're gonna wanna check out TMetric. Now, just like Toggl, you can either use TMetric here within your browser, or you can download the Desktop version as well.
I find this very handy, because I have most of the functionality here available to me, such as adding a new task and starting and stopping that timer. And I can see a summary of those tasks here below.
But when you log into the TMetric interface, here you can see how my entire morning has gone. Not only do you see the tasks that I have entered in here, but you can see what I've been doing, because I've chosen to use the TMetric Extension.
So, I can dive into this a little bit deeper and see how long I've actually spent in each of these applications. This can be great to find periods of your day where you're maybe wasting time, or just wondering where all of that time went.
TMetric also has a very functional task manager here as well if you wanna manage those tasks in conjunction with your time. But an area where a TMetric really excels is if you're needing time tracking for billable purposes.
If I click on Projects here, you can see that I can track my projects down to the cent, based on how much time I have used. So, whether I'm allocating a certain amount of time for a project or a certain budget, I can do so right here within Tmetric.
TMetric also allows you to do some other advanced things, such as time off requests. So, for example, I've already set up a policy here.
So, if I need to request some paid time off or want to set this up for members of my staff, I can do so. Here, I'm gonna let myself know, and I'm gonna request it in days.
So, I'm gonna request, I wanna take off, I'm gonna take off two weeks. No, I can't. Why? Because my balance is only five days.
Again, something else that I can manage right here within TMetric. So, so much more than just a time tracker.
If I come back here and say, okay, I don't have that much available to me, there, that will be approved, or hopefully approved, because it's within the balance that I've set here.
So, if you need a time tracker that can show you some more advanced details about where you or other members of your team are spending their time and you would like some further advanced features, you may want to check out TMetric.
To find out more details, be sure to click the link in the description below. Now, do you have a time tracker or a timer that you love?
Be sure to share it with me in the comments down below. Thank you so much for watching today's video, and remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.
