The Floating Timer: Track Time Without Leaving Your Current View

Time tracking in Miru used to mean navigating to the Time Tracking page, clicking “Add Entry,” filling out the form, saving. Fine — until you’re reviewing an invoice and realize you forgot to log the last two hours. Navigate away, log it, navigate back. Small friction, but friction compounds.

Harvest solved this years ago with a persistent timer. Toggl has one too. We should have built this sooner. Now we have.

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How It Works

A floating timer lives in the bottom-left corner of every page in Miru. It’s a small card — unobtrusive when minimized, detailed when expanded.

Start. Click the play button. The timer begins counting. A green border tells you it’s running. You can minimize it to a compact view showing just the elapsed time and pause/play controls. Keep working on whatever you were doing.

While it runs. Select your project from the dropdown. Add a description of what you’re working on. The timer persists across page navigations and even survives a browser refresh — it saves state to localStorage, so closing a tab accidentally doesn’t lose your tracked time.

Stop. Click stop and a save dialog appears. It shows you the project, duration, and description. Confirm to save the entry. Or discard if you started the timer by accident. The entry goes straight into today’s timesheet, tagged to the right project and client.

Pause and resume. Sometimes you step away. The timer pauses. Come back, hit play. The elapsed time picks up where it left off. No mental arithmetic about how long your lunch break was.

That’s the entire workflow. Start, work, stop, save. You never leave the page you’re on.

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Inline Mode

On the Time Tracking page itself, the timer shows up inline at the top of the entry list instead of floating in the corner. Same functionality, better context. You see your running timer right above today’s entries. When you save, the new entry appears in the list immediately.

The inline placement also gives you more room for the project selector and description field, so you’re not squinting at a compact floating card. It’s the same React component with a different placement prop. One codebase, two contexts.

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Why We Built It

Competitive parity. Harvest has had a running timer for years. Every time we evaluated Miru against Harvest, the first question was “where’s the timer?” We’d explain that our workflow was entry-based, not timer-based. Technically correct but practically wrong.

Some people think in timers. They start the clock when they sit down and stop it when they stand up. A good tool adapts to the user, not the other way around.

Now Miru supports both. Enter time manually or start a timer. Your choice. Same result in the timesheet either way.

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Try It

The floating timer is live now for all accounts. Open Miru, look at the bottom-left corner of any page. Click play. Do your work. Click stop. Save.

No settings to enable. No feature flag to toggle. It’s just there, waiting for you to use it — or ignore it entirely if entry-based logging is your thing.