I’ve been always interested in productivity products as I hope they could help me stay focus and manage my time more effectively. Therefore, I was quite excited when trying the Timeular ZEI°, a time-tracking device that successfully raised more than €300,000 on Kickstarter. Let’s find out if the product is any good.
Unboxing & Testing
Design & Features
The Timeular ZEI° has a polyhedron shape with 8 sides. It features a minimal design and I thought that there is no button on it. Actually, it has a rubber cover at a corner and you can find the battery here; Also when you press on the rubber piece, the device will power on/off.
In fact, you don’t need to power on/off the device manually. When you don’t need to track your time, just place it on the base and it will turn off automatically. The next time you use it, take it off the base and it will be powered on. Notice that when you put in on the base, you need to place it upright or it won’t shut down properly and keep tracking time.
The device uses a coin battery and it could last up to 1 year, so you don’t need to worry about replacing it anytime soon.
The product comes with some stickers, a pen, and an eraser. To start using the ZEI°, you will need to write all tasks to the sides of the device and install an app on your smartphone or PC. Then, assign those tasks in the app so that it could recognize all of them when you flip the ZEI°. The side on top will show the currently active task.
It’s fun to use the device as you can easily flip it to change among different tasks. We are also provided with a detailed snapshot showing time spent on each task.
This is absolutely faster and more convenient than productivity apps because we don’t need to touch the app at all. It changes the task immediately after I flip the device, everything goes smoothly and doesn’t affect my workflow. However, I sometimes still forget changing the task after finishing another one.
Another disadvantage is that I can’t set a duration for a task. For instance, I want to take a short break of 30 minutes and then come back to work, but the app doesn’t have an option to create an alarm after a period of time, so you will always have to check the clock and switch task promptly.
Overall, I love the Timeular ZEI° and really hope the developer could add more functionalities to make it a complete time-tracking solution. It would undoubtedly improve my productivity then.
