Tracking time tells you what happened. A target tells you what you meant to happen — thirty hours a week on billable work, ten hours a month on one client, forty hours before a launch — and it's the difference between reading your week afterwards and steering it while it's still running.
This walkthrough sets one up end to end: the number, the rhythm, what counts toward it, the nudge that arrives before the deadline rather than after it, and the record each closed period leaves behind. It assumes you're already logging time — none of it means anything without that. Time goals are part of the Plus and Pro plans; the tracker itself is on every plan, and only the targets layered on top of it are paid.
The goal
State a number of hours and a period, let Ceum measure your real tracked time against it as you work, and end up with an honest record of whether you hit it — period after period, without doing arithmetic yourself.
1. Create the goal
Open Time tracker goals from the Time tracker page and choose New goal. Three fields carry the whole idea:
- Name. What you're chasing, in your own words — "Focused client work", "Acme retainer".
- Target hours. You type hours, and half hours are fine:
7.5is a legal answer, and so is40. - Repeats. Weekly, Monthly or One time. A repeating goal restarts with its full target at the start of each period. A one-time goal runs between the Starts and Ends dates you give it, up to a year apart.
Weeks run Monday to Sunday and months are calendar months, both resolved in your timezone rather than the server's — so a Sunday-evening session belongs to the week you think it does.
A repeating goal runs forever unless you tell it to stop. On a repeating goal Ends is a switch rather than a date: leave it on Never, or set it to On a date and give the day itself in Last day. The goal then keeps going through the last whole period that finishes by that day and suspends itself. A monthly goal told to stop mid-month closes the previous month and no more, because a part-month measured against a full month's target would report a miss you never actually had.
2. Narrow what it counts
A goal with nothing else set counts every tracked hour. To point it at something specific, add criteria. Each one names a single thing, and you can stack up to twenty of any mix:
- Client — entries that reach that client through whatever chain of task and project links connects them.
- Project — entries linked to a task of that project.
- Task — entries on that task and on its subtasks, because a container task holds no time of its own.
- Tag — entries carrying that tag. The entry's own tags, not its task's.
- Text — entries whose description contains what you typed, upper or lower case.
From the second criterion on, you also choose how they combine. Any counts an entry matching at least one of them — "Acme, or anything tagged billable". All counts only an entry matching every one — "work on the redesign that is also tagged billable". With one criterion or none, the two settings select exactly the same entries, which is why the choice only appears once there are two.
An entry counts once, however many criteria it satisfies: an hour on the redesign, tagged billable, described "design review", contributes one hour to a goal naming all three — not three.
Two details decide how much of an entry counts. An entry that straddles the period boundary contributes only the slice inside it, so a session running from Sunday evening into Monday is split between the two weeks. And a timer that's still running counts as it runs, which is what makes the bar move while you work.
3. Ask to be reminded while you can still act
Switch on Remind me as the deadline nears and Ceum emails you once per period, when the period is nearly spent and the target is still unmet. Goals due a reminder on the same day arrive as one email rather than several, and a goal is never reminded twice in the same period.
"Nearly spent" defaults to the last fifth of the period — roughly a day and a half of a week, roughly six days of a month. If you'd rather set a fixed lead, give the goal a number of days between 1 and 27.
The same threshold drives everything else that speaks: the goal's progress bar turns amber, the row appears in the bell and on Alerts, and the email goes out — all from one rule, so a bar can never be amber while the alerts list calls the same goal fine. Reminders are always a warning, never urgent, and a missed goal isn't marked red anywhere; Time tracker goals says why.
Leave reminders off and the goal still measures and still records — it just stays quiet, and its bar keeps its normal colour whatever the numbers say. To stop the emails later without touching the goals themselves, Reminder emails and Report emails are separate categories under notification settings.
4. Watch it, and suspend what you're not chasing
Each row on the goals page carries a progress bar and the figures behind it — hours logged, hours targeted, and the percentage. The percentage isn't capped: a goal at 140% says so, because over-achievement is worth knowing. Expanding a row shows the current period's dates, when it resets, the full set of criteria, and how they combine.
The Time tracker page's right-hand card switches between Totals and Goals, so you can watch the session you're running move the bar without leaving the timer.
A goal you're not chasing right now can be suspended. It greys out, sinks to the bottom of the list, and stops alerting and reminding — but it isn't deleted and its history is untouched. Suspension pauses attention, not record-keeping: a suspended weekly goal still gets a history row each week, otherwise resuming it later would leave a hole nothing can fill.
5. Read the closed periods
Goal history is the record of every period that has closed, newest first: the dates it covered, which goal, hours tracked against the target that was in force at the time, and whether it was met or missed. A missed period is a neutral badge, not a red one — it's a fact about a period that is over, not something to act on.
Two things about that record are worth knowing before you rely on it. The numbers are frozen, not recalculated: raising a goal's target today doesn't retroactively change whether last month was met, and the criteria are stored with their labels, so a period stays readable even after the client or task it named is deleted.
And the snapshot isn't a cache — it's the only copy. A closed period can't be recomputed from the time entries behind it, because those entries don't necessarily survive: tracked time is kept indefinitely on the paid plans, but on Free it's pruned after a year under data retention. That's why the row is written the moment a period ends rather than worked out on demand.
Closed periods can also come to you. Turn on Include in my report email and each one appears in your report email as a line with the hours and the outcome — there's no separate cadence to set, because a weekly goal reports weekly and a monthly one monthly. They also show on the time tracker reports page, under whichever period you have navigated to.
What you end up with
A number that means something, measured against real tracked time as you work, with a nudge that arrives while the period can still be saved and a permanent record once it cannot. The setup is a few minutes per goal; after that the only question left is the useful one — not "how many hours did I do?", but "am I going to make it?".