Track Time for Google Calendar Events Automatically

When planning a work week, your spend time scheduling upcoming events and business meetings. And, surely, you want to track those events as a part of your workday. But, after you've finished planning, you don't want to re-enter the events to your time-sheet manually. And, if you use Google Calendar for planning, you can automatically track time spent on preplanned events.

TMetric - Zapier integration

TMetric team delivered the integration with Google Calendar partnering with Zapier web automation service. By publishing TMetric on Zapier platform, we provided not only integrations with Google Calendar, but also with 1000+ other web apps. You can explore TMetric app on Zapier to see the integrations.

You can also refer to the documentation for TMetric - Zapier integration.

Configuring Google Calendar - TMetric integration

So you want to track time spent on your business meetings. You've already entered all the events to Google Calendar. And now, you need to track time in TMetric, but you don't want to re-enter each eventmanually (and you may even forget to do this).

Let's configure a Zap that will do this time tracking for you. The rest of the article assumes that you already have a Zapier account (free or paid).

Creating a Zap

Open the TMetric Integrations page on Zapier
Find and open a template named Create time entries in TMetric when Google Calendar events end
Click the Create this Zap button.

Setting up Google Calendar events

For Google Calendar app, the template selects the Event Ended trigger . Click Continue and connect your Google account on the next step.

After connecting the Google account, you'll see Set up Google Calendar Event screen

For the basic setup, just select a calendar from which Zapier will pull your events.

Tracking particular events from a calendar

By default, TMetric will track all events from the calendar you selected. If you want to track only specific event from the calendar (e.g. daily team stand-up meetings), you need to add a search term.

Click Show advanced options on 'Set up Google Calendar Event' screen.
Enter a word or a phrase in the Search Term field, for example, Daily Stand-up.
Click Continue.

Setting a time tracking action for events

For TMetric app, the template selects a Create Time Entry action. Click Continue and connect your TMetric account on the next step.

After connecting the TMetric account, you'll need to set a couple of fields to get going.

Select an account, in which time entries should be created.
Select your name from the User drop-down list. Time entries will be created on your behalf.

Optionally, you can select a project and tags for new time entries.

Finalizing your integration

All what's left is to test the action and turn on the Zap.

Note: After a successful test, you won't see a new time entry in TMetric. The time entry is not created, because in the test event, the start time and the end time are the same. And TMetric doesn't create time entries with zero duration.

Troubleshooting

You may notice that your Google Calendar - TMetric integration creates a time entry that is shorter than the planned event duration. That happens because Zapier pulls your calendar once in every 15 minutes. And Zapier may signal that an event has ended a little ahead of the time.

To fix this issue, try increasing the Time After value (see screenshot above). You may set it to 20 minutes.

Then, the time entries will be created with some delay, but they'll have more accurate duration.

About TMetric

TMetric is a time tracking web app for both freelancers and big companies. Great control over time intervals and project budgets, flexible billable rates, crystal clear reporting, transparent team monitoring and lots of integrations, all wrapped up into a light interface.