Time Journal

The easiest way to track your personal productivity

Coming soon to iPhone, iPad, & macOS

Indie Project

Time Journal

I'm working on a personal work journal that makes it easy to track what you worked on.

The app runs a timer that checks-in every 30 minutes and asks "what are I working on right now?" Simply jot down a bullet point or two and move on. At the end of the day, you'll have a detailed log of how you spent your time.

My Role

Concept, design, & development

Tools

Figma, Swift, Xcode

Problem Statement

If you don’t document your work, will it count?

In today’s agile-oriented companies, performance reviews are often measured by how well you complete guestimates (aka sprint tasks) rather than what you actually do.

Unfortunately, trying to update a productivity system for every unplanned task is a distraction on top of the distraction.

My Solution

What am I working on... right now?

My solution isn’t original. In fact, productivity coaches and systems all recommend this as the best way to start being more productive: write down what you’re doing as you do it.

My app makes it easy.

It uses a periodic timer to check-in and asks “what am I working on right now?” There’s no overhead to remember to do it, adds zero distractions to your actual work, and makes it easy to deal with unplanned tasks.

It’s perfect for makers!

Internal UX Research

macOS prototype

My first step was to build a rough macOS prototype. This allowed me to work through basic features and layouts while dogfooding the app.

I was reluctant to do outside user testing because the database was a temporary solution and I didn't want to have to deal with migration. Nor cosmetics.

The Timer window displayed a Pomodoro timer and today's list of entries

The journal window displayed a history of daily entries

Product Design

Early wireframes

Vertical mobile-design exploration based on the horizontal MacOS prototype

Timer & Today list layouts on iPhone, iPad Pro, & macOS

Journal layouts for iPhone, iPad Pro, & macOS

Product Design

Detailed wireframes

I only created detailed wireframes for iPhone to save time and because those layouts will work as columns for iPad & macOS. Most of my time was spent on defining new functionality and figuring out how to minimize them for the MVP.

The other challenge was locking down my timer models. My Maker timer was difficult to explain, so I ended up creating a new timer — the Hourly timer — as an intermediary model.

Timer

Journal

Entry Pop-up

Settings

Prototyping

Interactive walkthroughs

These are interactive walkthroughs to demonstrate how the app works.

Feel free to try them out!

I built them in Figma to test the user flow and iron out any inconsistencies and missing steps before moving on to high-fidelity designs.

Timer

Journal