Timeular is one of the increasingly common productivity apps that help you with time management, and as I have been using it solidly since 2018, I figured I could give a full review.

At its core it consists of an eight sided dice, that you write your job or tasks on, then when you’re working, you flip it to that side, do your work and when done, you flip it to a different side and it logs the time you spent on each task.

I live on the damn thing.

It was a instant good fit for the way I do my work, particularly when I first started using it, I was a contractor with multiple clients, and while I was working for one client, I might take a phone call from another, and then finish that call and revert back to the previous client i was working on, this could happen with multiple “Time and material ” clients during a day.

At the end of the day, you can cut up what you did for your different tasks and fill in appropriate timesheets. Excellent for when you are working from home or remote and you’re not following a static 9 to 5.

Personally I find this an easy method of timekeeping and helps manage distractions. You may have taken a couple of meetings, then you can do the dishes. After that, you might have to take the dog for a walk. You can separate between housework and work ¹, but at 5pm you can at a glance tell timewise if you have done a solid days work and if not you can correct and work later to make up ².

Overall It takes a lot of the effort out of timekeeping in general and while originally obviously designed for freelancers, it is very adaptable to the new world of hybrid working for permies. In the app its self you’re supposed to fill in all the task details with little notes, and yes I have done it this way for a couple of clients who also used Timeular  so they could see what I was doing, I normally don’t use it that way. I use it to give me nice blocks of time so I can work out how to fill in my notebooks at the end of the day, also to cross check and make sure that said notebooks are correct.

So far all has been perfect as described but it does have its downsides.. Well,.. that’s not entirely fair, it USED to have its downsides. When it first started years ago, its Bluetooth connection was appalling. The dice used expensive coin batteries like no ones business, it was non rechargeable. The app crashed. The connections didn’t drop well. A lot of failings.

But that’s where I feel it has stood the test of time. They have constantly improved, and over the years everything has been ironed out. The Bluetooth now is absolutely perfect. Not a single missed item. Its integration and stability is exceptionally good. They’ve changed the dice. It’s now rechargeable, and lasts for months on a single charge.

All this means that it’s now something that I would heartily recommend in all ways ³ .

Now, some people might think that you could just use a simple app timer with a start and stop. But that’s not how the human brain works, particularly when it’s busy. I find the big difference between Timeular and just about all the others is the physical act of turning the dice. It even allows you to have guilt free breaks from working. If you’re having a brain fart or someone sends you a particularly good video that you want to watch. You can just flip it on to blank and take your break guilt free, as you are not taking up a clients time.

Do I have any improvements to it? Yes, I would like a simple on off switch for the dice. I would like to be able to just drop it in a rucksack as I go, rather than having a bunfight with it to turn it off and then on again and re-pair, also personally I don’t used the pen and fancy stickers they supply, I just use a label printer as its much clearer. but that’s it.

Particularly in conjunction with other time management items. It really is something that I would not give up easily.

1. this surprisingly makes sure that I pull my own weight with the household jobs as I know how much I have actually done in the home[↩]
2. with a fringe benefit of helping to address procrastination[↩]
3. Although you sometimes crack a grin at the fact its obviously still quite a small team, as they do the odd strange feature that they don’t quite get right.. the weekly goal setting for example does not work to my liking[↩]

Software dictation has been around for absolutely ages,

All the way from early Dragon software, which used to take hours and hours to learn an individual, and even then wasn’t particularly good.

They have come on in leaps and bounds with modern phones chattering to the internet in order to do diagnostics and proper translation, but even then they’re not real time at true conversational speed over more than a short sentence.

When one claims to be absolutely amazing at transcribing, and able to do it for meetings and multiple voices, I have to say I was more than a little suspicious, and this is what Otter AI claims.

Now I didn’t want it for meetings. I wanted it for writing blog posts like this one, but I wanted to just rant while wearing a headset, and for it to keep up with me, rather than for me to stop/start or talk in a slightly stilted fashion. I find that even the Google or Amazon stuff only gets about 9 words in 10 right, and often get sentences scrambled, often because it interprets something I’ve said that is technologically or geekily specific, as a generic word.

So I was introduced to Otter AI, and after I got past the forced way they are selling it, it is actually a very clever mixture of relatively new and old style technology.

When you use it, they say that you’re supposed to dictate into it, and then it will do magic to make everything amazing.

Don’t get overexcited. What it actually does is use standard speech to text for what you’re seeing in real time, where it gets the normal 9 out of 10 words right. And then once you’ve finished your meeting/rant, it will send your audio up to the internet and have another go at it with a lot more accuracy, as it can do it at its leisure.

This turns out to be a brilliant idea. Although they should really sell it better rather than just confusing the hell out of you.

Their target audience is obviously for long meetings or meeting note takers, not people who actually just want a decent accurate natural voice dictation app, the UI reflects that, the first few times I used it I desperately kept trying to stop and edit the text I was working on, but that is not how you do it.

The ordinary real time voice to speech conversion just acts as a general guide to what you have been saying, its not the final product, just say what you have got to say, save it, and let it clean everything up. Once you’ve got the hang of that as a process, then it’s a brilliant tool.

It’s amazing for dictating large formats or even quick blogs and notes. it has a good export feature which while not perfect, will happily export my monologues to WordPress and dump them into a standard post which I can then edit.

However again their market position is very off for my kind of usage. It seems to be only priced for people who are doing hours upon hours of meetings. Whereas people like myself that just want it for dictation are never going to come off the free tier, They’ve got no reason to. So they should really introduce say a £5 a month tier with some slight advantages (say a upgraded export to blog platforms). without that, people like me will never have a genuine reason to purchase it.

However all in all, if you’re wanting to write blog posts, or just take notes that you can then export as text. I couldn’t recommend it more.