Connecting a source

Clockify

If you already keep timesheets, this is the shortest route in: the hours are recorded, and nothing about how you work has to change. Toiling Away reads the entries you have already stopped and turns them into toil.

New here? Toiling Away turns recorded time into animals that live in a habitat of your own.

Get an API key

  1. In Clockify, click your profile picture in the top right and choose Preferences.
  2. Open the Advanced tab, then Manage API keys -> Generate.
  3. Copy it before you close the window. Clockify shows a key once and will not show it again. If you lose it, generate another.
  4. In Toiling Away, open Connections -> add Clockify, and paste the key in. It is checked immediately, so a bad key fails there and then rather than quietly never syncing.

What gets counted

Your own time entries, in whichever Clockify workspace is your active one. If you belong to several, it follows the one Clockify has you in. It does not read the others, and it never reads anybody else's time.

Only entries you have stopped. A timer still running has no end yet, so there is nothing to count; it arrives on a later sync once you stop it.

An hour is ten toil. Descriptions are not stored; we keep only when an entry started and stopped, and which project it belonged to.

After that it is automatic

It checks every fifteen minutes or so while you are working, and less often when nothing is happening. There is no point asking Clockify the same question thirty-two times through a night nobody worked. Anything new appears within a sync or two, and there is a Sync now button if you would rather not wait.

Each sync re-reads the last twenty-four hours, so correcting an entry in Clockify corrects it here too rather than leaving the first version behind.

Overlaps are merged. If a stretch of an afternoon is covered by Clockify and by something else you have connected, it counts once. You cannot earn twice from one hour by tracking it twice.

If it stops working

A connection that keeps failing shows the reason Clockify gave, in its own words, on the Connections screen. The usual cause is a key that has been regenerated or revoked. Paste the new one in and it picks up where it left off. Removing the connection stops the syncing; the toil you have already earned stays where it is.