Time Tracking with TopTracker
Time tracking is an essential activity for teams who are interested in studying data and identifying trends in their work. TopTracker is a lightweight system for tracking time with web and desktop applications. TopTracker is also entirely free of charge to use. Read on to familiarize yourself with the TopTracker application. At LocEssentials, we use TopTracker to track our time on all of our work.
Getting into TopTracker
- Create an account here: https://tracker.toptal.com/signup
- Sign into the web application here: https://tracker.toptal.com/signin
- Download the desktop application here: https://www.toptal.com/tracker/#download
Navigating Around the Web Application
The web application consists of 3 main panes. In the pane in the bottom left corner, you can access your settings. The pane in the top left corner of the screen is where you can navigate to the various pages in the application. The primary pane displays information related to the page you selected. You can start tracking time on a project by navigating to the Web Tracker page and clicking the green Play button alongside the corresponding project.
Manually Entering Time Data
You can manually enter time data into a project by navigating to My Activities and then clicking the Timer button in the top right corner of the primary pane (next to the date period). A dialogue will appear in which you can select the project for which you’d like to manually add a time entry and enter the activity description, date, and times (in military time). Once you’re finished with your manual time entry, click the green Submit button.
Note on Manually Time Entries versus Live Time Tracking
You can track your time simultaneous to your work or you can manually enter in time data. Simultaneously tracking your time has the benefit of more accurate data, since accurate time data is difficult to obtain if time worked is not captured as close as possible to the time at which the work was produced. Getting accurate time data from live tracking takes a lot of practice, so you’re encouraged to start getting practice early. It is inevitable that at first you’ll forget to track time, or you’ll forget to stop the tracker. Once you get good at time tracking, the data produced is an important indicator of your efficiency and ability to meet your quotes.
How to Edit a Time Entry
When you notice you need to edit some of your time data, you can do that easily from the web interface, and ONLY the web interface (so don’t bother digging around the desktop application if you realize you need to edit data you logged from there). Editing your data is easy. Go to the My Activities tab, find the time entry you need to edit, click the ellipses, and then press Edit. You can also Split a time entry if you switched between projects and forgot to stop the tracker.
How to Export a Time Data Report
You may at times want to export your time tracking data by project or the time you’ve worked for the entire class. To export your activity in a line-by-line time tracking report navigate to Reports > Activity Log > Export as CSV. Use the dropdowns along the top of the primary pane to select the projects, team members, and dates for which you’d like to export data.
Navigating Around the Desktop Application
The desktop application offers some functionality not offered on the web – though again, you can’t edit time data from the desktop application, so no need to go searching around for that there.
| Screenshot | Description |
 | Your active project list appears within the purple box on the top. You can toggle between Start/Stop Tracking using the big green (or red) button. Use that button to quickly get started. |
 | When you start tracking time from the desktop application, this dialogue may appear in which you’ll be prompted to enter in an activity description (more on that at the end). Notice that if you press the gear, set the TopTracker dialogue to pop up every 15 minutes. This is a great method to get back on track for those (like me) who easily get lost on the Internet. |
 | You can toggle between live time tracking and adding manual entries by clicking between the Manual Time Entry button and your name. Notice the Preferences gear and the Quick Sign Out button in the bottom left corner too. |
 | Did you notice the Preferences gear in the image in the previous row? Click that gear to access important settings. For instance, under “General” Preferences you can prompt the system to take a screenshot of your screen and a camera shot of you working. Screenshots can be used to later confirm that you were working on what the time entry says you were working on. Camera shots can be used to verify the person completing the work (for certification exams for instance). |
 | Under “Advanced” Preferences (again, we started at the gear), you can blur your screen- and camerashots for a little more privacy. You can also ask the system to prompt you for a description of your activity when you start or stop work. (Maybe you’re the kind of person who doesn’t quite know what you’ll work on until you go. In this case, recording your description at the end of an activity would be preferable.) |
 | Under “Tracking Sources” Preferences (accessed through the gear), you can have TopTracker record your keyboard and mouse hits. |
Back in the web application, you can review your activity, keyboard hits, and mouse hits from the My Activities tab. Perhaps keyboard and mouse hits could be used as indicators for processes becoming more efficient (requiring less key strokes) or for typing speed at different conditions (when tired versus when awake).
Tracking Activities to Projects
When you’re ready to start time tracking, you’ll need to track your activities to the appropriate project. You will be added to the TopTracker project for any projects that you are participating in. We have TopTracker projects started for administrative activities, localization engineering, course developing and time teaching.
You can find a full list of our TopTracker projects in this database, which also defines the types of activities that should be tracked to each project. If you would like to have a new TopTracker project created, please reach out to localization.essentials@gmail.com with your idea for a new project.
Writing Descriptions for Activities Tracked
Whether you use the web or the desktop applications, enter a description of the activity you’re tracking in the dialogue. In the web application, edit the activity description by clicking in the space with the Pencil that says “Briefly describe what you are doing.”
In the desktop application, edit the activity description within the New Activity Description dialog, where it says “Briefly describe what you are working on.”
In the desktop application, press the ENTER button on your keyboard to submit your description and ESCAPE to track your time without an activity description. When you stop tracking your time, you will then be prompted again to submit a Completed Activity Description.
When writing descriptions of the activity you’re tracking, please be specific yet brief and focus upon describing the outcome you are working toward, rather than giving a general description that prevents us from tying your work to the value it provides. For example, “Emailing” or “Chatting” are two general descriptions that don’t really convey the value of the activity. On the other hand, “Contacting enrolled students about course updates” conveys the value of your task.
Tracking Activity in Meaningful Units
When you get started with time tracking, getting into the habit of doing so can be challenging. You may wonder to what level of detail you should be tracking your activities. Our advice is that that you track your activity according to meaningful units. For our purposes, a meaningful unit is usually an outcome that you are working toward. Sometimes a meaningful unit may also be an important step that needs to be completed when working toward a large outcome. For our purposes, a meaningful unit is not so large so as to be too general for data analysis purposes, not is it so small so as to be entirely too detail oriented.
To illustrate, when working toward the large goal of developing a course, work is broken down into creating individual lessons, all of the lessons that go together under a single topic, and all of the topics that go together into a full course. When tracking time developing a course, if I track all of my activity only under the course name (i.e. Loc101) I lose an important opportunity to understand how much time is needed to develop the lessons and modules for the course. In that case, I may want to track my time according to the specific topic I’m working on, the specific lesson I’m working on, or even a specific component of a lesson that I’m working on. For example, I could track my time creating a video (i.e. Lesson 1.1 video: What is localization?), which would include my time creating graphics and a script, recording the video, creating subtitles and a transcript, etc. Another example would be tracking my time doing the final quality control check on a full course (i.e. Loc101 – Final Review), which would include my time checking through each lesson to ensure that all links work, that all resources are accounted for in the Works Consulted, that no major spelling or terminology errors can be detected, etc.
When tracking meaningful units of activity, try to keep your activity descriptions consistent. This way, later on when you want to analyze the time tracking data you’ve generated, you’ll need to do less data cleanup in order to be able to do so.
Above all, leverage time tracking in your work. Inevitably, you’ll start tracking your time working toward one outcome and be interrupted or naturally flow to working toward another outcome. That’s okay, and don’t worry too much about going back and editing your data so that it’s perfect. Instead, work with the TopTracker application. Set up automatic reminders of the task that you’re working on to 15-minute intervals. When the reminder pops us, you’ll have the opportunity to check whether you are working toward the outcome you intended to be working toward, or to update the activity description to reflect the outcome you are currently working toward.
Helpful Links
TopTracker has some helpful pages you may want to visit, such as Frequently Asked Questions and the Feedback page. (It is not certain if you will get a response if you submit a question via the Feedback page.) You can also review the terms and conditions related to your use of the TopTracker system via the following links:
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