When I started working on Sablio, I listed every feature I'd seen in time-tracking tools. I counted 84.
Then I watched what my first five testers actually did. They used three gestures.
Gesture 01 — Start
You begin a block when you begin to work. In Sablio, it's ⌘K, type the client or project name, hit Enter. Two seconds.
No category dropdown. No mandatory tag. No description field to fill. The block name is enough to recognise what it was when you come back to it.
Gesture 02 — Bill
At the end of the month (or week, depending on your cycle), you open Billing, pick a client, you see every block in the period. Click Export. Clean PDF, clean CSV, readable lines.
Your clients receive the document. They do not see:
- the exact start and stop time of each block,
- days without activity,
- the apps you were using.
They see: projects, durations, total. Nothing else. No leak.
Gesture 03 — Share
If you have a team, the third person you meet in Sablio is the manager. They get an aggregate view: who's available this week, how many hours we've sold on the Bernier project, are we at risk of going over.
They do not see: detailed task lists per person, start and end times per block, the location someone connected from.
Why three
Because almost every tool I tried asked me to learn its vocabulary. Project, Task, Subtask, Activity, Tag, Category, Client, Workspace. For three weeks I'm wondering where do I put this? instead of working.
Three gestures, three surfaces, three words. The rest is noise.
— Patrick