Supported apps in Clockk

TL;DR: Clockk has a unique concept of “Supported” and “Unsupported” apps. “Supported” apps are the apps where we can unambiguously determine the document or project you’re working on (e.g. Microsoft Word, Google Sheets, QuickBooks). We make it easy to “Assign always” a supported app to a project. “Unsupported” apps are used for any and all projects (e.g. Outlook, Apple Mail, Calendar, Finder, WinZip, Google Drive, the survey you spent 20 minutes filling out). Usually you’ll “Assign once” the time you spend in unsupported apps.

The challenge of AI time tracking

Automated time trackers all struggle with the same fundamental problem: all we can access is the application name and a window title. From Clockk’s perspective (and our competition’s!) the time you spend in Windows Explorer renaming a file is equivalent to the time you spend in Microsoft Word, writing the file itself.

Add to that that you’re constantly switching apps, all day long. You might spend a day working on a Word document, but during that day you also spent hours in your email, calendar, Teams and Slack, not to mention Zoom calls and Google Meets. Plus minutes here and there in a note-taking app, Chat GPT, Finder/Windows Explorer/Google Drive, plus all the websites you visited.

The challenge is how does an automated tracker like Clockk show you the important things you did, without overwhelming you with all the little details, while still making those little details available if you need them.

Most of our competition deals with this by “rounding up”. If you spent 8 or 15 minutes in Word, then the 15 minutes are for Word. But if you zoom in, you can the app you had open every second of every day, regarless how important that app is. Clockk has its own approach called “time stacking” which we discuss in our Deep Dive on how Clockk’s tracking works.

Clockk solution is “supported” and “unsupported” apps.

“Supported” apps

Supported apps are applications whose usage Clockk can uniquely assign to a project.

For example, when you’re using Microsoft Word or Adobe Photoshop, you’re also working on a document e.g. ACME Mobile App Proposal.docx, Daifoon logo design refresh 2024.psd. Using the document filename, Clockk can unambiguously assign the Word doc to the ACME Mobile App project and the Photoshop doc to the Daifoon Logo Design project.

By default, assigning a supported app is an “assign always” action, meaning that anytime you open that app & doc again in the future, its time will be auto-assigned to the selected project.

“Unsupported” apps

Some apps are not specific to a particular project, and some apps are not for project work at all. In Clockk, these apps are considered “unsupported” apps.

There are several reasons an app might not be supported:

The app doesn’t unambiguously show which project you’re working on (e.g. Email, Outlook, Calendar, Chat GPT, Zoom, Google Meet, Webex)
The app doesn’t share the window title (e.g. Final Cut Pro)
The app isn’t used for project work (e.g. WinZip, games, Messages, News, Spotify)
The app might be used for project work, but only in short bursts (e.g. password managers, file transfer tools like Transmit and WinSCP, file viewers like Preview, Adobe Acrobat or Irfanview)
It’s a website you dip into and out of (e.g. Google search, blog post, news article, Stack Overflow, and a million other pages you might hit browsing the web)
We haven’t added it as a supported app (yet — see below)

An unsupported app won’t appear in Clockk until you’ve used it for at least 5 minutes. That’s why your google searches don’t show up, but the 20-minute survey you filled in does.

By default, when you assign an unsupported app, you assign that use of it only. Future uses of that same app need to be assigned separately. You can override this behaviour by changing “Once” to “Always” when you assign.

App “Promotion”

When you’ve used an app or website long enough (at least 5 minutes), Clockk “promotes” it so it appears in your Activity view.

This way your web browsing doesn’t clutter your display, but your time studying a competitor’s website does.

By default, promoted apps are “assign once”, meaning that every time you use this particular promoted app you’ll need to assign its time again. You can override this by choosing “Always”.

The grey area between “Supported” and “Unsupported”

Clockk has a third “supported unsupported apps” category.

These are popular apps that for reasons out of our control we have poor support for. For example, when you start a Zoom call, we want that time to show up in Clockk right away. However, because of limitations in Zoom, we can’t tell one Zoom call apart from another (this is why back-to-back Zoom calls appear as one big chunk of time).

You’ll find with all these grey area apps:

Time is tracked immediately, without the 5-minute delay (see App “Promotion” above).
We explain the shortcoming, why it happens, and what to do about it.

Proposing a new “Supported” app

Adding a new supported app is usually quite easy. We just need to know how it shows a project or document name. With desktop apps, this information can only be in the window title. With web apps, we can use the window title, or an element on the page, but we usually need your help for that.

You can also browse Clockk’s list of supported apps and supported web apps. We’re adding new supported apps all the time.

Browsers

The Clockk Desktop app ignores all browser activity.

There’s nothing less helpful in an automated time tracking tool than telling you used Chrome for 4 hours 48 minutes. Clockk aims to do better.

Instead, install the Clockk Browser extension in each browser and browser profile you would like tracked.

If you have a web-heavy workflow, you need the Clockk Browser extension.