Your First Time Entry

You have an organization, a team, and a project with categories. Now you need to track time against it. AbleTime's time tracker can be viewed both as weekly calendar where entries are visual blocks you create, move, and resize, or a list of entries organized by day. This guide walks you through creating your first entry, starting a timer, and understanding the two views.

What You See When You Land

The Time Tracker opens to the current week, by default on the Calendar, but you can change this by clicking on the settings icon . The layout has three zones:

• The toolbar at the top — a timer button on the left, a New Time Entry button in the center, and view toggles (calendar/list) plus a settings gear on the right.

• The day headers — one column per visible day showing the day name, date, and that day's total hours. The week total appears next to the navigation controls.

• The grid — a time column on the left (hours running top to bottom) and one column per day. If today falls within the visible week, a colored line marks the current time and moves every minute.

Navigate between weeks using the left and right arrows next to the date, or click the date to open a date picker. You cannot navigate into the future.

The grid density — how tall each hour is and how times snap — comes from the Default Minute Increment and Default Calendar Zoom settings your admin configured in organization settings. Weekend columns appear based on the Show Weekend by Default setting.

Creating an Entry on the Calendar

There are two ways to create an entry directly on the grid:

Click an empty cell. This opens the entry form with a one-hour block starting at the time you clicked, pre-filled with your default project and category.

Click and drag across a range of time. As you drag, a semi-transparent box follows your cursor showing the start time, end time, and duration. Release to open the entry form with those times pre-filled.

Both paths open the same form. The difference is how much time you pre-select before the form appears.

The Entry Form

The Time Entry Form opens as a dialog with a colored header bar matching the selected category's color. The header shows the project and category name — click it to change the selection.

Clicking the header opens the project and category picker. Select a project from the dropdown, then choose a category. If Time Flow is enabled, you also see tasks — selecting a task automatically sets the project, category, and links the time entry to that task.

Starting a Timer

Instead of filling in start and end times after the fact, you can track time live. Click the timer button (stopwatch icon) in the toolbar. A timer starts against your default project and category, and the toolbar changes to show the category name, project, and elapsed time counting up in real time.

On the calendar, the entry appears as a card that grows as time passes — it updates every minute. The current time line turns red while a timer is active, and a small stop button appears on the line itself.

To stop the timer, click the timer button again (now showing a red square) or click the stop button on the time line. The entry's end time is set to now, and the card becomes a normal editable entry.

Working with Entries on the Grid

Once an entry exists on the calendar, you can interact with it directly:

• Click a card to open it for editing.

• Drag a card to move it to a different time slot or a different day.

• Drag the bottom edge of a card to resize it — extending or shortening the duration.

• Use the three-dot menu on a card to Duplicate or Delete the entry.

Entries that have been submitted or locked (anything beyond the initial "new" state) show a lock icon instead of the menu and cannot be dragged or resized. This happens when those entries have been billed to a customer, for instance. Active Timers also cannot be moved — they update automatically as time passes.

When multiple entries overlap, the calendar narrows and offsets them so all cards remain visible.

The List View

Click the list icon in the toolbar to switch views. The list shows the same data — same week, same entries — organized as a stack of day sections instead of a visual grid.

Each day section has a header with the full date and that day's total. Below it, each entry appears as a row showing a color bar, project and category, time range, duration, and icons indicating whether a description, tags, or Time Flow task are attached. Click a row to edit it.

The list view is useful when you need to scan a week's entries quickly without caring about their visual position on a timeline. Everything you can do from the calendar — edit, duplicate, delete — is also available from the row's overflow menu.

What to Do Next

You now have a time entry on the calendar. From here:

• Open the Productivity Drawer (the icon rail on the right edge of the screen) to start timers, pick up recent tasks, and monitor your stats without leaving the tracker. The next guide — Working with the Productivity Drawer — covers this.

• If Time Flow is enabled, link entries to tasks so time flows up from entries to Epics to projects in your progress reports.

• Build the habit: timer for live work, click-and-drag for past work, duplicate for recurring blocks.