The time tracker records what you did. A time goal states what you meant to do: thirty hours a week, ten hours a month on Acme, forty hours before the launch. Ceum then measures the first against the second and tells you where you stand.
Goals live at Time goals, reachable from the Time tracker page. They are part of the Plus plan.
Creating a goal
A goal needs a name and a target in hours. Everything else narrows it:
- 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 dates you give it.
- Applies to — all tracked time by default, or narrowed to a single client or a single project. A goal scoped to both counts only time that belongs to each.
- Remind me as the deadline nears — see Reminders below.
- Include in my report email — see Reporting below.
Weeks run Monday to Sunday and months are calendar months, both in your timezone rather than the server's. If you change your timezone in settings, future periods follow it.
Reading the list
Each row carries a progress bar and the figures behind it — hours logged, hours targeted, and the percentage. The percentage is not capped: a goal at 140% says so, because over-achievement is a real thing to know.
The bar turns amber only when the period is nearly over and the target is still unmet. A bar that went amber merely for being under target would be amber all week, every week, and would stop meaning anything.
Expanding a row shows the current period's dates and the goal's settings.
Suspending a goal
A goal you are not chasing right now can be suspended. It greys out, sorts to the bottom of the list, and stops alerting and reminding — but it is not deleted, and its history is untouched. Resume it whenever you like.
Suspending does not stop its periods from closing. A suspended weekly goal still gets a row in the history each week, showing what you happened to log. Suspension pauses attention, not record-keeping.
On the timer page
The Time tracker page's right-hand card switches between Totals and Goals. The Goals view shows your active goals with their bars, so you can see the effect of the session you are running without leaving the page.
Reminders
Switch on Remind me as the deadline nears and Ceum will email you once per period when the period is nearly spent and the target is not met yet.
"Nearly spent" defaults to the last fifth of the period — about a day and a half of a week, about six days of a month. A fraction rather than a fixed number of days, because two days is most of the end of a week and barely the end of a month. If you would rather set a fixed lead, give the goal a number of days and it will use that instead.
You get at most one reminder per goal per period, and goals due a reminder on the same day arrive as one email rather than several.
Reminders also appear in the bell and on the Alerts page while the deadline is close. They are always a warning, never urgent — see below.
A missed goal is not a failure
Nothing in Ceum marks a missed goal red, and that is deliberate. When a period ends, the goal starts again with its full target restored. A red badge would either sit on a row that is, at that moment, perfectly fine, or it would be painted onto a period you can no longer do anything about.
Where a shortfall does show up is the history — as a fact about a period that has closed, not an alarm about one you are still in.
History
Goal history is the record of every period that has closed: which goal, which period, hours logged against the target in force at the time, and whether it was met.
Two things about it are worth knowing:
- The numbers are frozen, not recalculated. Editing a goal's target today does not change whether last month was met.
- The record is not a cache. Finished time entries are eventually removed under your plan's data retention limits, and once they are gone a closed period cannot be recomputed from anything. The snapshot is the only copy.
Reporting
Turn on Include in my report email for a goal and its closed periods appear in your Ceum report email, one line per period with the hours and the outcome.
There is no separate weekly-or-monthly setting for the report, because a goal already has a rhythm: a weekly goal reports weekly, a monthly one monthly, and an account with both hears from each as it closes.
Closed goal periods also appear on the time tracker reports page, under the period you have navigated to. Reporting is part of the Reports feature on your plan.
To stop the report email entirely, switch off Report emails under notification settings. Reminder emails are a separate category there, so you can keep one and drop the other.
On mobile
The mobile app shows your goals with their progress and lets you suspend or resume one — the decisions you make while looking at the number. Creating and editing goals is done on the web, since a goal is set up once and then watched.
Goal reminders appear in the mobile alerts screen alongside everything else.
What counts toward a goal
Any time entry that overlaps the goal's period contributes the part of it that falls inside — an entry running from Sunday evening into Monday counts toward each week for the share that belongs to it. A timer that is still running counts too, and grows as you watch.
A goal scoped to a client or project counts only entries linked to it, through whatever chain of task and project links connects them.
If a goal's scope covers an unusually large amount of tracked time, Ceum may tell you it cannot measure it rather than making the whole page wait. The goal still appears; only its numbers are withheld.