I am a automators listener, and played over the last year with timery for timetracking.
I"ve tried to build some shortcuts and I was succesfull, however I would like to take both my shortcut developjment skills and my time tracking to a higher level.
In automators episode 59 Rosemary mensioned, how to track time spend in spesific apps with the open app command and the start of a timer and the closing of an app and the stopping of a timer.
This grapped my attention, I would love to know how much time I spend reading, for example and I would love to know how much time i’ve waisted on the sosial media.
Could someone describe how to build such shortcuts? I am blind and can’t use a screenshot, but a few lines of text would be of great help.
Would love to get further with this.
Thanks in advance.
In the Shortcuts app, there is a section called Automations.
When you select the plus symbol to add an automation, select personal automation.
From the list of automation triggers, choose App.
For the app, as well as choosing which app, you can also trigger what about the app activity is the trigger. Is opened, or is closed.
That is what you then link your desired shortcut to in the subsequent step.
Good practice for backup and reuse is to use a Run Shortcut action in your automation to run a Shortcut in your My Shortcuts area.
Hopefully, that will get you on the right track. Point the open app automations to the relevant start timer shortcut and the close app automations to the stop.
1 Like
I am struggling with this because I do manage to get the timer started but ideally I would want it to stop when I physically close the application. As it stands at the moment if I even move off of the screen that I’m tracking (voicedream reader) it triggers the stop timer action.
To further confuse and complicate matters that act of stopping the timer isn’t actually happening and the time appears to continue to run anyway???
I don’t know if this is a glitch within Timery or something that I’m not doing within the shortcut.
I’d be interested to know if you have any thoughts on this.
sorry I can’t helpt you marcus,
THanks forthe previous reply btw.
I’ve managed to create the oopen app and fire a shortcut trigger as described in the reply above the one by Marcus.
Howeever I can’t find / toggel the when app closed trigger.
That might be a voiceover bug or something, I have to look in that with a pair of working eyes.
Further more I am wondering If I am doing it right.
I’ve created a bunch of tags of daily things I am going to within the toggltrack dashboard, from there I created some shortcuts within the shortcuts app.
TImery states something like: no details started.
So I think I am still doing a few things wrong.
I lean a lot along the way so it is fun to dive in to.
Thanks for any more directions.