"Track Time Without Touching the Mouse"

⌘⇧T. Timer starts. You did not touch the mouse, you did not open a menu, you did not wait for a page to load. The timer is running and you are back to work.

This is the interaction model owntime is built around, and it is the thing most different about using it. Not the pricing. Not the local file. The fact that you should rarely have to take your hands off the keyboard.

#The timer

Global hotkey, works anywhere. Press it once to start, again to stop. The timer ticks in your menu bar, seconds running, project name visible. You can see it without switching windows. When you stop, the entry files itself under whatever project was active.

The hotkey is configurable. If ⌘⇧T conflicts with something else, change it. The point is not the specific chord. The point is that starting a timer is a keystroke, not a workflow.

#The views

⌘1 for Today

. ⌘2 for Time Entries. ⌘3 for Clients and Projects. ⌘4 for Invoices. ⌘5 for Timesheet. ⌘6 for Timeline. Settings is ⌘,. Every major view is one key combo from anywhere in the app.

If you spend your day in a code editor or a design tool, you do not want to move your mouse to a time tracker, click through to the right tab, and click again to start. You want to press a key, confirm the project, and go back to what you were doing. That is what the view shortcuts are for.

#The tray and the menu bar

There is a system tray icon. It shows the live timer status and lets you start or stop without opening the main window. There is a native menu bar. You do not have to keep the full app visible to know the timer is running.

This matters more than it sounds. A time tracker you can see without switching context is a time tracker you actually use. One you have to open and navigate is one you forget.

#The CLI

For the terminal crowd, there is a CLI. owntime start, owntime stop, owntime status, owntime log. It talks to the app over localhost on port 45123. It is Raycast-friendly, which is a sentence that will matter to some of you and none to everyone else. If you live in Raycast or Alfred, the CLI lets you start a timer without leaving the launcher.

I am not going to pretend the CLI is the main way people use the app. It is not. But it exists, because the people who want it really want it, and because it is the same architecture that lets other tools talk to owntime without a cloud API.

#The honest limits

Keyboard-first does not mean mouse-free. Building an invoice still involves some clicking. The weekly grid is easier with a mouse than with arrow keys. I optimized for the tasks you do a hundred times a day, starting and stopping the timer, switching views, not for the tasks you do once a month.

If you want a fully keyboard-driven terminal UI, owntime is not that. It is a desktop app that respects the keyboard. There is a difference.

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