Where do I actually start work? In Trello. That’s where the cards live, where the day’s priorities sit, where the client context is. The tracker lives in another tab. Every timer used to start the same way: switch tabs, find or create the entry, type a description, click start. Multiply by every context switch in a day and that’s real minutes burned on the act of recording time.
So I closed the loop with a Chrome extension.
What it does
The extension adds a small clock icon inside the header of every Trello card. Click it and a confirm overlay appears with the card title prefilled as the timer description. Confirm and a timer starts in TimeTracker, mapped to the project that corresponds to the Trello board.
Click the icon again on a card with a running timer and it stops.
The toolbar popup shows every running timer with a running elapsed counter and a stop button per timer. Most days I have two or three running concurrently because work is interleaved, and the popup lets me close out any of them without leaving whatever tab I’m on.
Mapping Trello boards to TimeTracker projects
Trello boards are not TimeTracker projects out of the box. First click on an unmapped board, an overlay walks me through picking the project. The mapping is stored once, and from then on every card on that board starts a timer against the right project.
If a board has no mapping, the extension routes to the mapping overlay instead of failing silently. Silent failure is the whole reason I distrust browser extensions.
Resolving the board, the hard way
Trello’s URLs vary. Sometimes I’m on a card direct link (/c/<id>), sometimes a board view, sometimes deep inside a workflow. The extension resolves the board ID through a fallback chain: URL first, then the DOM if I’m on a direct card URL, then the Trello API if neither works. That last fallback matters when Trello has redirected or hot-loaded the page in a way that doesn’t expose the ID.
The fewer steps between starting work and starting a timer, the more accurately the timer matches what I actually did.
