Timeline

The Timeline shows your day hour by hour. Each app and breakdown gets its own row, and the time you spent in it appears as blocks along that row — much like clips in a video editor. Open it with the Timeline button at the top of the tray window.

Moving around

• Scroll sideways — hold Space, or hold the middle mouse button, and drag.
• Zoom — hold Option (Mac) or Ctrl (Windows) and scroll.
• Make rows taller or shorter — hold Cmd (Mac) or Alt (Windows) and scroll.
• Change day — the ← and → arrow keys, or the date at the top.
• Jump to Now — the button at the bottom brings you back to the current time.

The ? button opens a guide to everything on the Timeline.

The Activity row

If you use activity categories, an Activity row at the top colors the day by type of work — coding, creative, communication, and so on. You can shrink it like any other row.

Buttons in the toolbar

• Idle Regions — show or hide the shaded stretches when you were away.
• Merge Blocks — join neighboring blocks of the same app into one longer block, so a busy day is easier to read. On by default. Totals for joined blocks are close but not exact; hover one to see every tag inside it. Turn it off to see each block separately.
• Cursor — show or hide the line that follows your mouse, with the time under it.

Fixing tracking mistakes

Right-click an idle stretch or a short block and choose Dispute idle time or Dispute time block:

• Dispute idle time — for a gap when you were actually there, like a meeting or reading a document without touching the computer. It fills the gap with the app you were using. You can do this when the same app or breakdown is on both sides of a gap of up to 90 minutes; those gaps have a small bridge icon in the corner.
• Dispute time block — removes a short block (3 minutes or less) with idle time on both sides. A computer can wake up briefly overnight and record a few seconds of time; this clears those away.

Time blocks to dispute

Vetroscope finds short blocks you might want to remove and collects them under the Alerts bell at the top right of the Timeline, with a red number showing how many. From there you can remove (Dispute block) or keep (Dismiss) each one, handle them all at once with Dispute all, or click one to scroll to it. Blocks you dismiss don’t come back. If a finished day still has some waiting, an alert in Alerts reminds you the next day — click it to open that day.

You can only fix these in the desktop app. The web dashboard shows idle time but can’t change it.

Tags on the Timeline

Blocks with a tag have a colored outline. The Tags panel on the right lists your tags; click one to highlight the blocks that have it.

To tag blocks, click one, or drag a box around several, then right-click and choose to tag them. You’ll be asked whether to tag these blocks only or also keep tagging new activity — so new time in that app or breakdown gets the tag too.

Right-click the name at the start of a row and choose Solo to show only that row.

Events

Events are notes you pin to the day — a meeting, a deadline, a trip to the gym. Right-click anywhere on the Timeline to add one at that time, or drag to give it a length. In the Events panel you can show or hide events, fade them, or shrink them to thin bars when a day gets crowded. Events also appear on the Calendar.