Hey Chris! This is a feature that I've also been looking for in all the time blocking apps, but none of them seem to have it.

This is a pretty long comment, but here are a few additional ideas I have on how you might implement this that slightly differ from the OP (or, at least, this is my ideal vision for how a time blocking + time tracking app should work):

The idea here would be that you plan the rest of your day when you get up in the morning, and then you use the timer to track what you're actually doing because it's very rare that you actually live your day by a planned schedule. This lets you have a plan but also gives you the flexibility to deal with disruptions and the chaos of real life. At the end of the day, you can see how you planned to spend your time vs. how you actually spent it.

In terms of UI/UX, maybe the Plan Calendar can have a high opacity (a lighter colour) and the Actual Time Calendar could have a lower opacity (darker colour). This would give a quick reference to users for what they planned on doing vs. what they actual did by looking at the areas of overlap between blocks. Admittedly, dealing with multiple calendars like this could become a UI nightmare, but if you're able to pull off a sleek-looking way to do this, Ellie would go right to the top of my productivity apps list.

Alternatively, maybe you can then add a Daily Review at the end of the day (like Sunsama does) where the user compares what they planned vs. what they actually did.

This also has the benefit of not requiring the user to keep shuffling events on the calendar again and again because of disruptions. You just start the timer when you're doing something and just use the Plan Calendar as a guideline. The Actual Time Calendar is the source of truth, as it were.

As a next step, you could then try to figure out how (and if) the Plan Calendar should change if the actual time on a given meeting overflows the planned period, etc.

Additionally, users can then also start tracking their time on unplanned activities (I'm thinking something along the lines of Toggl Track's top bar, which lets you just start tracking with a single click) and these can, again, push the next activity further down in the plan.

And, of course, if these disruptions push your last activities in the day out of your work hours, then that's a great reason for them to be pushed to the next day during the Daily Review (or for them to be marked as Overtime, if you add billable hours and hourly rates in the future).

PS: Once you decide to add team features to the app in the future, this could also be a great way to deal with the friction between managers and users in terms of planning. In that scenario, the manager can edit each member's Planning Calendar, while the employees would be tracking their own time using the manager's plan as a guideline. However, when they don't exact meet that plan (a bug takes too long to fix), this will be properly reflected for the manager at the end of the day (with all the other benefits, e.g., he can then push some tasks to the next day's plan).

I want this too but can see it being a bit complicated if you leave and come back to tasks (and record more time) throughout the day (which I do a lot - I rarely just work in one big chunk). My absolute ideal would be to record time in a calendar like Toggl does but I don't imagine Ellie is set up for that.

Yes please!!

Yes this feature would be very useful.

Hey Nat and Nini

I'm having some trouble wrapping my head around this 😅

So is the change you are looking for to basically make it so the tasks use "actual time" instead of "estimate time" on the timebox calendar when present?

Example:

Task has 30 min estimated time (on calendar, it will be a 30 min long event)

Task is complete and given a 15 min actual time (on the calendar, instead of a 30 min event, use this new "actual time" so it becomes a 15 min event since it is present)

Is this correct?

I was just about to post the same. Look forward to the possibility of doing this. For now, to ensure my timeblock is useable, I'm swapping my actual and estimated times, so it reflects correctly in the timebox. For example, if I originally thought it would take 1 hour (estimated) and a task only took 15 mins (actual), to ensure I don't lose the knowledge, I update estimated to 15 mins and actual to 1 hour. I just need to be wary of this when I use this data to reflect.