Tracking your time with Toggl

- [Instructor] The chances are that if you work in post-production, you don't just work on one project at a time. You probably juggle a bunch of them simultaneously. Even if you are just working on one large project, let's say a feature film or a long-form television show, there are still probably multiple categories and tasks within that project that might be helpful to track separately. Whether you're interested in tracking your time spent for productivity purposes, or you want to better understand how your team is using their time, or if you're invoicing outside clients, I have found that the best way to track your time in Trello is using the web app Toggl.

Now, I briefly demonstrated the basics of how to use this program in a previous lesson in this course, but now I'm going to show you how to integrate it with your existing Trello workflow. Here we are at our Trello homepage and like the previous lesson about team communication, I'm going to use the Move Yourself activity Video Vault as our example. I'm going to go into the Move Yourself Video Vaults and for the sake of this lesson, once again, I'm going to assume that I am team member, Chris Vissar, but what I want to do this time, rather than just understand what part of the project I'm responsible for, I want to be able to track my time.

What I'm going to do is first hit the F key to filter and then I want to filter everything only based on myself so I understand what part of the project I'm responsible for. The next step is I want to be able to track my time, while I'm, for example, working on the Radiating Neck Pain video. What I want to do is go into Toggl first and I want to make sure that this project is set up properly. I'm going to go into projects and you can see that I have a project called Move Yourself Video Vault.

That's great, but now what I want to do is be able to track my time on a more granular level. For example, if I go into tags, you can see that I have an editorial tag. Let's call this tag Color Correction and let's call another one Audio Mixing. Now, I have more granular information about my work on the Move Yourself activity Video Vault. This is great, however, when I track my time, I don't need to do it in Toggl.

I can do it directly from Trello and I'm going to show you why being able to track directly in Trello is going to be much more useful and save you time keeping track of specific information, project names, cast names, and what not. To do this is going to require the Toggl Chrome extension, so I'm just going to do a search for Toggl Chrome extension. Here it is, the Toggl button. Really super simple. All I'm going to do is select Add to Chrome and Add Extension, but now there's going to be one more specific step.

You need to give Toggl permission to work with Trello. I'm going to close this and I'm going to filter permissions by Trello. I want to select Yes and say Allow. There we go, so this should be all set up. Now, what I want to do is go back to my Trello board. In order for this to be enabled, I'm going to have to do a hard refresh of my browser window. To do that, all you need to do, at least in Chrome, is Cmd + Shift + r. So far, you're going to notice it doesn't really look any different, but there are two main differences.

Number one, you now have a Toggl button inside your extensions bar in Chrome, which means that if you don't have any other tabs open because you want to work as minimal as possible without any distractions in your browser, you can track right from here. If I wanted to track my time, I could do Toggl Time Tracker, Start New. You can see the timer has already started and now what I want to do is say I'm working on EXPA01 RP, Radiating Neck Pain.

This if for the project Move Yourself Video Vault and right now I'm doing editorial work. There, now I'm tracking my time doing this specific project and if I go back into the Toggl window and I go to Timer, guess what? You're going to see that it's also tracking the exact same information right in Toggl. That seems great. Why would I need an integration any better than that? Well, I'm going to show you where you can save yourself even more time by not having to track all the specific information, getting even more granular.

If I go into my card, you're now going to notice one major difference. I have a Start Timer button here for the whole card, but I also have Start Timer buttons for every single check mark. Let's say that you get all of these notes. We're going to turn these check marks off and we're going to assume that these are not complete. What I'm going to do first is just stop our timer here. You can see that this is now going to be tracked. There's two ways that you're going to be able to do this, the first of which is let's say that we're working on Radiating Neck Pain.

All I have to do is hit Start Timer. I can very quickly put in the project and the tag and hit Done and guess what? It is automatically tracking the name of the Trello card, so this name is never going to be different. If there's some reason in your team that for some invoicing purposes or billing purposes or accounting purposes, if you get this code wrong by one number, somebody's not going to get paid. Well, if your team leader is setting up the name of your cards properly, you never have to enter it again, because when you hit Start or Stop Timer, it's going to be based on the name of your Trello card which is great! Now, we can get even more granular.

If I go ahead and Stop Timer, you're going to see that it now has the correct proper name of the Trello card right here and all I had to do was tell it which project and which tag. Now we can go even one layer deeper and we can track every specific piece of information in our checklist. It's going to be the same process. All I have to do is click the button. I want to add my project, I want to add my tag. Let's say we're doing Color Correction this time, for example, and I hit Done. You'll see that it's red meaning it's active and we're tracking.

If you choose to keep the tab open, it's also going to track in the Toggl tab right here, but most importantly what it's also going to be doing is tracking this specific check mark. If there's information in this specific check mark, for example, if you're doing notes on version 1.2 or version 1.3, whatever it is, if you need to track very, very specific information, you don't need to write it down every time you change tasks. I can just hit Stop. I can check that off. I can say Start, do the project again, do the tags, hit Done, let that tie in for a few seconds, hit Stop.

I finish this task, now I'm going to start this task. Same thing, Video Vault, Color Correction. All this being done in real time with no editing whatsoever. I hit Stop. I now have, down to the second, exactly how much time it took me for each specific check mark in Toggl. If you have larger teams, then you most likely have much more sophisticated tracking for both billing and invoicing purposes. I'm not going to pretend that this is going to work for a giant company.

However, this is a really great way to manage small teams and monitor their productivity on a much more granular level, as well as if you're an individual or a freelancer. It's a great way to track your time in specific projects for different clients, because remember, time measured is time that can be more efficiently allocated in the future.