Toggl Track + deariary: where did your time go?

#integration #guide #toggl-track

You tracked seven hours and forty-two minutes today. You know this because Toggl Track says so: a neat timeline of colored blocks, each labeled with a project name, each rounded to the minute.

What you do not know, looking at that timeline, is what kind of day it was. The three hours on “Client Portal” felt like two because you were in flow. The ninety minutes of “Admin” felt like four because you were fighting a spreadsheet. The twenty-minute gap between “Sprint planning” and “Code review” was a walk around the block that saved your afternoon. Toggl Track recorded the durations. It did not record the texture.

deariary reads your time entries from Toggl Track and weaves them into a diary entry alongside everything else from your day. The colored blocks become paragraphs. The durations become rhythm. The gaps between entries become the moments your timer was not running, which are often the moments worth remembering.

How the connection works

Toggl Track uses an API token for authentication. You copy your personal API token from your Toggl Track profile page and paste it into deariary’s settings. deariary validates the token by calling Toggl’s API, then stores it encrypted.

The token grants read-only access to your time entries. deariary cannot start or stop timers, create projects, modify entries, or interact with your Toggl Track account in any way. You can revoke access at any time by disconnecting Toggl Track from your deariary settings, or by resetting the API token in Toggl Track itself.

What deariary collects from Toggl Track

Each morning, deariary fetches your previous day’s time entries from Toggl Track’s API. Here is what each entry yields:

Time entries

Description: the label you typed when you started the timer (“Write blog post”, “Fix auth bug”, “Client call with Tanaka-san”)
Start and stop times: converted to your configured timezone so the diary reads in local time
Duration: how long the entry ran, rounded to the nearest minute
Project name: which project the entry belongs to, if assigned
Client name: the client associated with the project, if set
Task name: the task within the project, if set (Toggl Track’s sub-project level)
Tags: any tags you applied to the entry (“billable”, “deep work”, “meeting”)
Billable flag: whether you marked the entry as billable

Aggregated stats

At the end of collection, deariary computes:

Total tracked time for the day
Total entry count
Per-project time totals, rendered as highlight cards on your entry (e.g., “Client Portal: 3h 12m”, “Internal: 2h 05m”), sorted from most time to least

What deariary does NOT collect

No workspace settings. deariary does not access your billing rates, team members, or workspace configuration.
No running timers. deariary only reads completed time entries. If a timer is still running, it has a negative duration in Toggl’s API and is filtered out automatically.
No reports or dashboards. Your saved reports, custom charts, and analytics remain private.
No team data. If you share a workspace with colleagues, deariary reads only your own entries.
No invoices or financial data. Billing amounts, hourly rates, invoices, and payment information are not accessed.
No desktop activity data. Toggl Track’s automated tracking feature records apps and websites in the background. deariary does not see this data. Only entries you explicitly created (by starting a timer or logging manually) are collected.
No write access. deariary reads time entries. It cannot create, edit, or delete anything in your Toggl Track account.

Revoking access is immediate: disconnect Toggl Track from your settings page and deariary discards the stored token. You can also reset your API token in Toggl Track’s profile page, which invalidates the old token everywhere.

From time blocks to a readable day

Here is what the transformation looks like. Say you had a Wednesday with six time entries across two projects and some personal time:

Toggl Track’s data looks something like:

09:15 - 10:45  "Sprint planning" (Project: Acme Redesign, Tag: meeting)
10:50 - 12:30  "Implement checkout flow" (Project: Acme Redesign, Tag: deep work)
13:00 - 13:25  "Reply to vendor emails" (Project: Internal, Tag: admin)
13:30 - 15:45  "Implement checkout flow" (Project: Acme Redesign, Tag: deep work)
16:00 - 16:30  "1:1 with Haruka" (Project: Internal, Tag: meeting)
16:45 - 17:15  "Code review: notification PR" (Project: Acme Redesign)

deariary hands this to the LLM alongside any other integration data for that day. The result reads like:

Wednesday was a deep work day. You started with sprint planning for the Acme redesign, then spent most of the morning and afternoon building the checkout flow, a session that stretched to nearly four hours across two blocks. In between you handled a quick round of vendor emails and caught up with Haruka in your weekly 1:1. The day wrapped with a code review on the notification PR before you logged off just after five.

Six time entries became a day. The project names told the LLM what you were working on. The tags distinguished meetings from focused work. The durations let it say “nearly four hours” instead of something vague. The gap between the two checkout-flow sessions (the lunch break, the email detour) gave the entry its rhythm.

What the LLM does with Toggl Track data

The Toggl Track fetcher provides context hints to the LLM: time entries represent intentional work blocks with explicit durations, and project/client names indicate the domain of the work.

On a day where you tracked eight hours across three projects, the time data carries the entry. On a day where you tracked two hours in the morning and spent the rest of the day in meetings visible through Google Calendar, Toggl Track provides the work-session detail while Calendar provides the meeting context. The LLM balances them proportionally.

This matters because time tracking data has a quality other integrations lack: it quantifies effort. The LLM can write “you spent the bulk of the afternoon on the redesign” because it knows the exact duration. It can note “a quick 25-minute admin block” because the brevity is meaningful. Durations are the difference between “you worked on the project” and “you worked on the project for four hours.”

The gaps are part of the story

Most integrations record what happened. Toggl Track also records, by implication, what did not happen. The gaps between time entries are the uncaptured moments: the lunch break, the walk, the conversation by the coffee machine, the twenty minutes you spent staring out the window.

deariary does not fabricate content for gaps. But when other integrations fill in the picture (a Slack message sent during a gap, a Todoist task completed between sessions), the diary shows the full texture of your day: work, rest, and everything in between. The result reads less like a timesheet and more like a day.

Toggl Track alone vs. with other integrations

A Toggl Track-only diary captures what you worked on and for how long. It reads like an annotated timesheet with narrative polish.

Add other integrations and the work blocks gain context:

Toggl Track only:

You tracked 6 hours and 45 minutes across two projects today. The morning was sprint planning and checkout flow implementation for Acme Redesign. After lunch you handled admin tasks and had a 1:1 meeting, then finished with a code review.

Toggl Track + Slack + GitHub:

Your morning sprint planning surfaced a blocker on the payment integration, which you discussed with Kenji in the engineering channel before diving into the checkout flow. The implementation went smoothly: you opened a draft PR with 340 lines changed and left a note about the edge case with expired cards. After a quick 1:1 with Haruka (she mentioned the Q3 roadmap draft is ready for review), you wrapped up by reviewing the notification PR that had been waiting since Monday.

The first version is a summary. The second is a workday you can almost feel. The Slack thread explains why you chose to tackle the checkout flow first. The GitHub PR gives the implementation concrete detail. The 1:1 note about Q3 planning connects your afternoon to a broader timeline. Together they reconstruct not just the work, but the workday.

On the Free plan you can connect one integration, which is enough to try Toggl Track on its own. Upgrading to Basic (up to 5 integrations) lets you layer your time entries with your calendar, messages, and code. See pricing on deariary.com for details.

When you do not track

Some days the timer never starts. You were in back-to-back meetings that never got logged. You spent the day reading, or thinking, or doing the kind of work that resists categorization. Or you simply forgot.

On those days, deariary has no Toggl Track data to include. If other integrations are connected, they fill in the picture: your calendar shows meetings, Slack shows conversations, GitHub shows commits. The entry still exists. It just does not have the duration-level detail that Toggl Track provides.

Over time, the days you track and the days you do not form their own pattern. A week of meticulous time logging followed by three days of nothing might mark a shift from client work to internal planning, or from structured productivity to creative exploration. The diary records both modes without judgment.

Setting it up

Connecting Toggl Track to deariary takes about a minute:

Go to app.deariary.com
Open Settings and find the Integrations section
Click Toggl Track
Copy your API token from your Toggl Track profile page and paste it into deariary

No OAuth redirects, no webhook URLs. The API token grants read-only access to your time entries. You can revoke it at any time by resetting the token in Toggl Track or disconnecting from deariary’s settings.

The next morning, your diary will include your time entries from the previous day.

What surprised us

Toggl Track has been connected to our own diaries since the earliest builds. Three things became clear over months of daily use.

Short entries are more interesting than long ones. A four-hour deep work block produces one sentence in the diary: “You spent the afternoon on the redesign.” A fifteen-minute entry labeled “quick fix: timezone bug” produces a sentence that, months later, reminds you of the exact problem, the exact frustration, and the moment you realized the fix was two lines. Specificity lives in the small entries.

The billable/non-billable split tells an emotional story. On days where 90% of tracked time is billable, the diary reads like a productive grind. On days split evenly between client work and internal projects, the diary reads like a day with breathing room. We did not expect the billing tags to carry emotional weight, but they do. The ratio between paid work and everything else shapes how a day feels when you re-read it.

Project names age better than task names. Six months from now, you will not remember what “Fix auth bug” meant. But you will remember what “Acme Redesign” was. The project name anchors the entry in a period of your life: the quarter you spent on that client, the sprint where everything clicked, the month before launch. Toggl Track’s project structure, which you set up for billing and reporting, turns out to be the scaffolding for memory.

Your Toggl Track already records where your hours go. deariary turns those time entries into a diary that preserves not just the durations, but the days they belonged to. The projects become chapters, the sessions become rhythm, and the workday becomes something worth re-reading when you have forgotten what that quarter felt like.

Connect Toggl Track to deariary