Start here
Quick start
On first launch, Rotelle asks for the few preferences that shape the workspace: daily and weekly goals, rounding precision, Pomodoro and eye-rest reminders, and what clicking the current menu-bar ticket should open. Every choice remains editable in Settings.
- 1Add a task
Choose a day and type a task name, a Jira key, or both.
- 2Start tracking
Press the play button. Starting another task normally stops the first.
- 3Review the day
Edit or round the time, then upload finished Jira worklogs when you are ready.
Daily tracking
Add tasks and run timers
Each day has a Task (optional) field and a Jira key or link field. Fill either one—or both—and use Add and start. A plain task works without Jira, and a Jira-only entry gets its issue details after Rotelle resolves it.
Pinned Jira tickets, recent tickets, current-sprint issues assigned to you, and Quick activities appear as suggestions. Completed and closed sprint issues are hidden, and Jira statuses are shown beside issue keys. Starting the same Jira issue again on the same day resumes its existing entry instead of creating a duplicate.
In Settings → General, choose whether clicking the current ticket in the menu bar opens recent tickets, Quick activities, pinned tickets, current-sprint issues, or the full tracker panel. Right-click the menu-bar widget to change those display settings quickly. Only its dedicated play button starts or stops a timer; clicking free space opens the full panel.
Press ⌘ F or use the search button in the tracker toolbar to find work by Jira key, task title, or note. Rotelle groups the complete history of each task by day, shows its total, and opens any selected day back in the tracker.
Before your Mac sleeps, turns off its display, or locks the session, Rotelle closes active timer segments. It resumes the same tasks afterward—including parallel timers—and asks whether the unavailable interval counted as work.
While the tracker is open and no text field is active, type the numeric part of a Jira key to highlight every matching task. The query disappears automatically. Use a day’s … menu to order its tasks by newest, oldest, or title.
Smart input
What Rotelle recognizes
| You enter | Rotelle uses |
|---|---|
TEAM-42 | The Jira issue key, normalized to uppercase. |
https://company.atlassian.net/browse/TEAM-42 | TEAM-42, extracted from the link. |
please check TEAM-42 today | TEAM-42, extracted from surrounding text. |
42 | A matching issue already used on that day, if one exists. |
| A familiar task phrase | The first matching Quick activity rule. |
Issue keys follow the usual PROJECT-123 shape. A web link without a recognizable issue key is ignored rather than saved as a broken Jira key.
Reusable work
Set up Quick activities
- Open Settings → Quick activities.
- Choose an icon, add a display title, the Jira key to use, and comma-separated keywords such as
daily, standup. - Type one of those phrases in the task field, or click the Quick activity suggestion.
Matching ignores case and diacritics and works when a keyword appears inside a longer task name. Rotelle uses the first matching rule and fills the Jira key only when the Jira field is empty.
When you edit a Quick activity and replace its Jira key with a normal ticket, Rotelle clears the Quick title and orange styling before loading the new issue. If the replacement key belongs to another Quick activity, that activity's title and styling are used instead.
Atlassian
Connect Jira and upload worklogs
- Open Settings → Jira and click Connect Jira.
- Sign in to Atlassian and approve access. Rotelle adds the Jira sites available to your account.
- Track a task with a Jira issue key or link. Rotelle fetches its title and remembers the ticket for later.
- Stop the timer, review the displayed time, then use the upload button on the task. Use Upload day to send all eligible worklogs for that day.
Copied, moved, older, and previously uploaded tasks also use their assigned Rotelle day. If an upload fails, a red circle with a cross remains on the task; open it to read Jira's error and retry after fixing the problem.
Pin a recurring ticket from its … menu, copy its Jira key or link, click its badge to open it in Jira, or choose Refresh Jira details if its title changed. Discovered projects can be assigned to the correct connection—or removed when they are stale—in Jira settings.
To remove an account, open Settings → Jira and choose Disconnect. Rotelle removes credentials that are no longer used from Keychain and safely unassigns linked projects while preserving time history and existing worklogs.
Rotelle checks every two hours for worklogs left behind on previous days. When it finds any, a Rotti panel can take you directly to the oldest affected day for review. Today is never treated as overdue.
Patterns and milestones
Read Statistics and collect achievements
Open Statistics to compare your most active tasks, days, weeks, and months. The summary also shows total tracked time, average completed day, longest session, active days, completed Pomodoros, and the distance accumulated through completed eye-rest breaks.
After at least five eligible completed sessions, Natural work rhythm estimates your typical focus length from the median of up to 30 recent sessions. Quick activities and sessions shorter than 5 minutes or longer than 4 hours are ignored. Choose Use for Pomodoro to apply that exact duration as your focus cycle.
The hourly map is built from actual timer sessions split across clock hours. The weekday map uses the same session history from Monday through Sunday. Quick activities remain part of your total time but are excluded from the task ranking so recurring background work does not hide real tasks.
Open Achievements to follow progress and inspect earned Rotti medals. Secret achievements hide their artwork, name, condition, and progress until unlocked. Click an earned medal for a full-size view, then use the arrow buttons or ← and → to browse the rest of your earned collection. Icon Painter rewards assigning icons to ten Quick activities; Homer and Cipollino remember 100 skipped eye-rest and Pomodoro breaks; Edward Scissorhands and Inevitable mark 100 and 1,000 time-entry splits.
Corrections
Edit, move, copy, and round time
- Click a displayed duration to briefly reveal the actual tracked time; double-click it to edit.
- Use a task’s … menu to add or subtract 5, 10, 15, 30, or 60 minutes.
- Press + or − while the tracker is active to adjust the current task by five minutes without opening a menu.
- Choose Round, or round every stopped task with Round day. The precision comes from Settings.
- Drag a task to another visible day to move it. Hold ⌥ Option while dropping to copy it without its old sessions or worklog state.
- Choose Split time entry from a stopped task’s … menu, enter the duration to move, and choose its destination date. The original and new entries keep the same combined displayed and raw session totals.
- Use the day menu to export one day as JSON or import it into another day.
Adjusted totals do not erase the original start and stop sessions, so you can reveal the actual tracked value later.
Review and recovery
Use the Productivity Library
Open Library from the tracker toolbar to work with your complete local history without crowding the daily workspace.
Search saved tasks, open their day, edit details, and inspect or correct individual timer sessions.
Audit a day or week for missing titles, Jira context, running timers, and other unfinished work before closing the period.
Choose a date range, compare totals, and export the result as CSV for further analysis.
Restore deleted tasks for 30 days, or permanently remove them when you are certain they are no longer needed.
Diagnostics shows the local database and snapshot locations and verifies that Rotelle can read its data store.
Keyboard
Keyboard shortcuts
These shortcuts work while Rotelle is active. The plus and minus shortcuts are ignored while you are editing text, preserve the original timer sessions, and never reduce a task below zero. Rotelle does not intercept keys in other applications.
Healthy pacing
Pomodoro and eye-rest reminders
Open Settings → Focus & breaks to enable Pomodoro, eye-rest reminders, or both. Choose focus and break lengths, how often a long break appears, and the eye-rest interval and duration.
The focus countdown advances only while a work timer is running. Break time keeps counting even if the task timer is paused.
The interval pauses with your work timer. Each uninterrupted completed break adds 20 feet to your distance statistic; closing or skipping it early does not count.
Breaks appear as centered in-app panels, including over full-screen spaces. Use the status cards to start a Pomodoro or eye-rest break immediately. Press Esc to close the current panel. Pomodoro and eye-rest panels each rotate through five dedicated Rotti scenes. Idle detection defaults to 10 minutes and uses one of five rotating scenes when a running timer has been left unattended.
At the start of each weekday, Rotelle can show an illustrated Rotti scene with a rotating practical tip. Disable these openings at any time in Settings → General.
Rotelle can also show an end-of-day review after you reach the daily goal and stop working for the selected interval, or at a fixed time. The review compares actual and rounded time, summarizes tasks, breaks, completed eye rests, and overtime, lets you adjust each worklog, then uploads eligible Jira entries and closes the day. You can snooze it whenever the day is not actually over.
Between your Macs
Optional private iCloud sync
Open Settings → General → iCloud and turn on sync to keep Rotelle data aligned across Macs signed into the same Apple Account. Rotelle remains fully usable offline and stores synced records in your private iCloud database.
The current week and profile travel as small compressed records, while older history stays in a separate archive. Concurrent sessions and changes to different tasks merge independently; permanent deletions leave tombstones so an offline Mac cannot restore stale work.
Help shape Rotelle
Send feedback or a feature request
Open Settings → Feedback, choose Feedback or Feature request, write your message, and press Send. Rotelle sends it directly to Plane & Ladybird without opening an email app or requiring an email account.
Only the message you write, its category, and your Rotelle and macOS versions are included. Task names, Jira content, tracked time, and contact details are not attached automatically.
Your data
Backup, restore, and privacy
Rotelle stores its time data locally by default. Use Settings → General to export a JSON backup containing entries, sessions, settings, ticket history, pinned tickets, achievements, and Jira connection metadata.
Passwords and OAuth secrets are stored in macOS Keychain and are not included in backup files. Importing a full backup replaces the current Rotelle data; running sessions are safely closed at import time.