📱Tracking time via WhatsApp

Here's how you can use WhatsApp to send updates to your Journal.

Getting your phone setup

Under My account you'll see a Devices tab in the middle at the top. Stick your phone number in the box and hit Save.

We'll send you a code via WhatsApp which you'll see to confirm by entering it into the little box that appears.

That's it. Now you can send messages to Zipwire via the same chat that sent you the code.

If you have WhatsApp on your Mac or PC

Perhaps your phone is in another room. If you have WhatsApp installed on the machine you're using, we're good.

You'll see on the screen a box and button which will open WhatsApp on your device with a prefilled message which you can send to us.

Sending us that special message will have the same effect as above. We've essentially just linked your phone number to your Zipwire account.

Sending your first Journal update

You're ready to send an update. You must begin your message with either:

• "Last week ..."

• "This week ..."

• "Week nn ..."

• "Today ..."

• "Yesterday ..."

You can then describe your week in natural language. Be sure to include any project or company names. You can use hours or ratio splits like 60/40 to divide time between activities.

If Zipwire can't work out what project, company, activity or shift you mean, it will create a new one!

See also naming activities.

Activity names

If you have a number of activities for company ABC then saying something like "Last week I worked for ABC all week" will mean Zipwire will have to take a guess at which of the ABC activities you worked on.

Similarly, if you have an activity like Design for more than one company, saying "Today I worked on Design for 4h" will cause Zipwire to guess which company that was for.

To avoid guesses or spurious new activities, type in (or say) more of the activity name to disambiguate what you mean.

Zipwire will reply with a view of your journal for the week, after the update. If your activities are linked to an assigned workflow, it'll mention the workplace that assigned it to you.

Overwriting

Be aware that journal updates from WhatsApp, Telegram, the API or other text-based AI updates will rewrite the entire day or week.

At present, Zipwire does not support or understand verbs such as add, clear, reset, remove etc. so you can't make targeted small changes to a day or week.

Sending an update and the reply showing the week in your journal.

We'd welcome feedback on this feature. Let us know what other ways you'd like to track time, or what other things you'd like to get done with a bot.

Using your voice

Some phones have a good dictation feature and the button to begin transcription is easy to access. In which case it's best to use this as you'll see the words appear before you send them.

Otherwise, you can use WhatsApp's record facility to record a voice memo of your journal update.

As before, remember to start with one of the trigger phrases like "Last week..." and, while holding the record button, speak a full breakdown of your working week, or day into your phone.

Tips:

• Spend a couple of seconds thinking about what you will say before going for it!

• Remember that you'll overwrite previous journal entries, so you can redo mess-ups.

• Only use this from somewhere quiet like your car or, if you're feeling brave, a library. HELLO!

We are continually looking at advances in AI and working on improving the limited bot functionality, with a view to showing you our interpretation of your instructions before letting you scrap it and try again or save the changes.

Note that any recordings you send to Zipwire are further sent to our AI providers for transcription. We're not aware that they keep them or listen to them, but if it's a concern then avoid this feature.