BlissCompass — user guide

BlissCompass is a personal time compass: you track what you spend your hours on, rate how each block felt, and see where your time and your bliss align.

Most time trackers tell you where your hours went. BlissCompass also records how each of those hours felt, then puts the two side by side — so you can see which work energises you, which drains you, and whether the gap is closing.

Start here

If you are new, read Getting started, then Tracking your time. Those two cover everything you need to use the app day to day. The rest explains what the app does with what you record.

Where BlissCompass runs

• The web app — the full picture: every chart, the complete history, and all your editing. This guide is written against it.
• The Chrome extension — a quick-capture popup for starting and rating a block without leaving the page you are working on. Install it from the Chrome Web Store, then see chapter 8.
• The iOS and Android apps — the same account and the same data, in a layout built for a phone. Not covered by this guide.

They all share one account. Start a timer in the extension, and it is on your dashboard when you next look.

What it costs

Nothing. BlissCompass is free, with no paid tier, no trial, and no usage limits. Screenshots in this guide are generated from a demonstration account, so the names and numbers in them are examples. See scripts/docs-screenshots/ for how they are produced.

1. Getting started

← Back to the guide · Next: Tracking your time →

Creating an account

Go to the app and choose Sign up.

You need a first name, a last name, an email address and a password of at least six characters, typed twice.

Choosing where your data lives

Before you can submit, you have to answer Where do you live?. This is not a formality — it decides which data centre holds your account permanently.

• I live in Europe — your data is stored in Frankfurt, Germany.
• I live outside Europe — your data is stored in our international data centre in Dublin.

Choosing Europe reveals a checkbox you must tick, acknowledging that your data will be stored in Frankfurt. The Sign up button stays disabled until you have both chosen a region and, for Europe, ticked the box.

Your region cannot be changed later, and your data never moves between regions. Everything you record — tasks, entries, ratings and notes — stays in the region you pick here. If you are unsure, pick the one where you actually live.

Once you submit, check your inbox and click the confirmation link before signing in.

Signing in

Enter your email and password and choose Sign in. The app works out which region your account belongs to and sends you to the right place automatically — there is nothing to configure.

If the details are wrong you will see Invalid login credentials. That message is deliberately the same whether the password was wrong or the email is not registered at all. After several rapid attempts you may be asked to wait before trying again.

Two alternatives sit under the Sign in button:

• Set a new password — the password reset flow, below.
• Sign in with email only — a magic link. Enter your address and we email you a link that signs you in without a password. It only works for accounts that already exist.

Resetting a password

Choose Set a new password on the sign-in screen, or go to /forgot-password.

Enter your email and we send a reset link. Following it takes you to a page where you set a new password, and then straight into the app.

Your first look

The first time you open the dashboard, a short walkthrough video appears.

Close it when you are done. You can watch it again at any time from the avatar menu in the top-right corner → Onboarding.

Behind it is an empty app, which tells you so and points at what to do next.

Start tracking puts your cursor in the task field at the top of the page, which is where everything begins.

Show me an example fills the dashboard with sample data so you can see the shape of it — which charts exist, what they measure, how a week reads — before you have a week of your own. A banner across the top says plainly that the numbers are not yours, and Hide example puts it back. The example is offered only until you track something; after that, everything you see is your own.

Reports and Insights are empty in the same way, each saying what it is waiting for.

The way to fill all of this in is tracking your first block — it takes about ten seconds.

Finding your way around

Every screen shares the same two pieces of furniture.

Down the left is the sidebar, split into what you can look at and what you can set up:

• Analyze — Dashboard, Reports, Insights
• Manage — Roles, Tags and Projects

Across the top is the tracker, which is available from every page, and your avatar. The avatar menu holds Settings, Onboarding and Sign out. ← Back to the guide · Next: Tracking your time →

2. Tracking your time

Everything in BlissCompass comes from one small habit: start a timer, work, stop it, and say how it felt. That last step is the part other time trackers skip, and it is the part that makes the rest of the app worth looking at.

The tracker

The tracker sits across the top of every page, so you never have to navigate anywhere to start.

Left to right: the task name, then Role, Project, Tag and Priority, then the elapsed time and the green start button.

Naming the task

Type what you are about to do into the task name field.

Use the same name each time you do the same thing. A task accumulates all its entries under one name, so Deep work on Q3 deck tracked eleven times is one task with eleven entries — which is what makes its total hours and its average rating meaningful. A new name every time gives you a long list of one-off tasks and nothing to compare.

Labelling it

The four selectors are all optional, and all worth using. They are what turns a flat list of hours into something you can slice.

Role — which hat you are wearing. Click it and you get a searchable list of your roles, with the option to create one on the spot.

Type to filter. If nothing matches, you can create a new role without leaving the tracker — you will be asked whether it is Personal, Work or Relationship. That choice is what feeds the Hours by life area chart on your dashboard.

Project — a named body of work, like Q3 launch or Kitchen renovation.

Tag — a free-form label. One per task.

Priority — a 3×3 grid. The letter is urgency and importance; the number ranks within the letter.

• A — urgent and important
• B — worth planning for
• C — can wait

with 1 the highest within each letter, so A1 is the most pressing thing you have and C3 the least.

You do not have to decide any of this up front. All four can be set or changed while the timer runs, and changed again afterwards from Reports.

Starting and stopping

Press the green button. The timer starts, and the button becomes a red stop button.

You can keep working anywhere in the app — the tracker follows you from page to page and keeps counting.

If you forgot to start it, click the elapsed-time display while the timer is running. You can type the hours, minutes and seconds it should really be, and Save. Use this rather than not tracking the block at all — an approximate entry is far more useful than a missing one.

Rating how it felt

Press the red stop button and the tracker asks the only question that matters.

Five faces, from draining on the left to loved-it on the right:

The scale is centred on zero deliberately. Neutral is the middle, not a low score — so time you actively disliked pulls your average down, rather than just failing to pull it up. This is what makes the score honest about a bad day.

Answer instinctively. The first face you reach for is almost always the right one, and a rating you agonised over is not more accurate.

Adding a note

Choosing a face opens an optional note, up to 500 characters.

Notes are where the why lives. A score tells you a block was draining three weeks later; a note tells you it was draining because the brief changed twice. Worth the ten seconds on anything that surprised you.

Press Submit to save the entry, or Cancel to discard the note and start again. You will see Entry created! when it is saved.

A good habit

• Rate immediately. The rating is about how the block felt, and that fades fast.
• Track the bad blocks too. An honest picture needs the admin, the meetings that overran and the evening that disappeared. Tracking only your good work gives you a flattering chart that tells you nothing.
• Don't over-categorise. A handful of roles and projects you actually use beats thirty you have to think about.

3. Understanding your bliss score

Your bliss score is the one number BlissCompass builds everything else from. It is worth understanding what it actually measures, because it is not quite the obvious thing.

The scale

Every entry you rate is worth a number from −2 to +2:

Zero is the middle of the scale, not the bottom. A day spent on work you actively disliked scores below zero — it does not merely score low.

Your daily score is weighted by time

Here is the important part. Your daily bliss score is not the average of your ratings. It is the average weighted by how long each block lasted:

daily score = sum(rating × duration) / sum(duration)

Two examples, both with one great block and one draining block:

A plain average calls those two days identical. They obviously were not. Because the score is weighted by duration, a long stretch of draining work counts for what it actually cost you, and a brief moment of delight does not paper over it.

The practical consequence: the score responds to where your hours go, not to how many separate things you did. You cannot lift it by logging lots of small enjoyable tasks. You lift it by moving hours.

Daily Bliss Score

The line chart on your dashboard plots that number for each day, with a face marking the level.

Expect it to be spiky. A single day is a small sample, and one long meeting can swing it. The shape over weeks is the signal; any individual point is mostly noise.

Bliss Balance

Underneath sits Bliss Balance, which exists to solve exactly that problem:

Rolling averages of your daily score — short-term above long-term means you are beating your own baseline

Two lines:

• Short-term (7-day) — roughly, the week you are having.
• Long-term (28-day) — your established baseline.

Read the gap, not the height:

• Short-term above long-term — this week is better than your normal. Whatever you changed recently is working.
• Short-term below long-term — this week is worse than your normal. Worth looking at Reports for what is new.
• The two lines converging — a recent change has become your new normal, for better or worse.

This framing matters because it compares you to yourself. There is no target score, and no score that is objectively good. Some jobs and some months are simply harder than others; what you can act on is the direction of travel.

Hours by life area

The stacked bar chart shows where your hours went each day, split into Personal, Work, Relationship and Not set.

Those come from the type you gave each role — so a role called Client delivery typed as Work puts its hours in the Work band. Time tracked against a task with no role lands in Not set.

Read it next to the bliss line. A week where the Work band swells and the bliss line sags is a much more specific finding than either chart alone.

What to do with all this

The useful question is rarely "is my score good". It is:

1. Which tasks sit at the bottom? Insights ranks them for you. Those are your candidates to delegate, batch, shorten or stop.
2. Which sit at the top, and are they getting enough hours? High-bliss, low-hours tasks are usually the ones that get squeezed out by everything urgent.
3. Is the gap in Bliss Balance moving the right way? That tells you whether the changes you already made are working, which is the only real test of them.

4. The dashboard

The dashboard is your overview: five charts and a table, all showing the same date range.

Choosing a date range

Everything on the page answers to the date range in the top right. It is shared with Reports and Insights, so setting it once carries across all three.

Presets down the side: Today, Yesterday, This week, Last 7 days, Last 14 days, Last 30 days, Last 90 days, This month. Or pick any two dates on the calendar for a custom range.

Choose a range, then press Apply. Nothing updates until you do.

Which range to use depends on the question:

• Today or Yesterday — did the day go the way I think it did?
• Last 7 days — the default working view.
• Last 30 / 90 days — the only ranges where the trend lines mean much.

Hours by life area

The stacked bars show how many hours you tracked each day, split into Personal, Work and Relationship — taken from the type of the role on each task. Untyped time appears as Not set.

The height of a bar is how much you tracked, not how long the day was. A short bar means a light day or a day you forgot to track.

Daily Bliss Score

Your duration-weighted score for each day, with a face at each point. Chapter 3 explains what the number means and why it is weighted.

Where a day has no tracked time, the line bridges the gap with a dash rather than breaking — so an untracked weekend does not read as a crash to zero.

Bliss Balance

The 7-day and 28-day rolling averages of your score. Read the gap between the lines: short-term above long-term means you are beating your own baseline. Again, chapter 3 has the detail.

Roles and Priorities

Two donut charts down the right-hand side.

Roles — the share of your tracked time by role. This is the chart that answers "where is it all actually going", and the answer is often not the one you would have guessed.

Priorities — the share by priority letter: A, B and C. A healthy split has real weight in B. If almost everything you track is A, either everything is genuinely on fire or the priorities have stopped carrying information.

The task table

Underneath, every task with tracked time in the range.

Sort by any column by clicking its header. Duration descending is the most revealing first look: the top of that list is where your time really goes, and the faces beside it tell you whether that is a problem.

Use Filter tasks to search by name, the filter buttons for bliss score, project and priority, and View to hide columns you do not want. Ten rows per page, with the pager underneath.

A running timer shows a blank duration — its time is not counted until you stop and rate it.

5. Reports

Reports is the complete log. Everything you have tracked in the date range, with the filters to find any of it and the controls to fix any of it.

The Total hours figure at the top is the sum for the current range. The date picker is the same one the dashboard uses, and the same range carries across both.

The table

One row per task, with the same columns as the dashboard plus Role, Tags and an Action column. Click any column header to sort.

Filtering

The toolbar above the table narrows things down:

• Filter reports — free-text search on the task name.
• Bliss score, Roles, Projects, Tags, Priority — dropdowns where you tick as many values as you want. Tasks with nothing set appear under (Not set).
• Notes — a toggle that limits the table to entries where you wrote something.
• Reset — appears once any filter is active, and clears all of them.
• Expand all / Collapse all — open every task at once.
• View — show or hide columns.

The filters combine. Role = Work, Bliss score = draining, Notes on is a short list of the worst work blocks you bothered to explain — which is usually the most useful screen in the app.

Individual entries

Click a row and it expands to show every entry recorded against that task.

Each entry has its number, duration, the face you gave it, when it was recorded, and your note. The Duration, Feedback and Recording at sub-headers sort within the task.

This is where a note earns its keep. A task with a middling average often turns out to be two different things — the version that goes well and the version that does not — and the notes are what tell them apart.

Editing

Two different things can be edited, and the difference matters.

Editing a task

The pencil in the Action column opens Edit task.

You can change its name, priority, project, tag and role. This changes the task itself, so it applies to every entry ever recorded against it. Use it to fix a typo in a name, or to re-file a task you originally put under the wrong role.

Editing an entry

The pencil beside an individual entry opens Edit Tracking, where you can change that one entry's date, its hours, minutes and seconds, and its note.

Use it when you left a timer running through lunch, or started one an hour late.

Deleting

The trash icon appears in both places and always asks first — Are you absolutely sure? — because neither deletion can be undone.

• Deleting an entry removes that one block of time. The task and its other entries stay.
• Deleting a task removes the task and every entry under it.

If you want a task out of your way without losing the history, rename it rather than deleting it. Your totals and charts are built from the entries, so deleting a task silently changes every past number it contributed to.

6. Insights

Insights is the shortest page in the app and often the most useful. Four leaderboards, five rows each, over whatever date range you have selected.

Top 5 Tasks by Priority

High — the A-priority tasks you gave the most time to. This is your confirmation that the urgent and important work actually got done.

Low — the C-priority tasks you gave the most time to. This is the interesting one. These are the things you told the app could wait, and then spent hours on anyway.

Top 5 Tasks by Bliss Score

High — where your best hours went.

Low — where your worst hours went.

Each row carries the task title, project, role, total duration, bliss score and priority, so you can see at a glance not just what scored badly but how much of your life it took.

Reading them together

The four tables are most useful crossed against each other. Look for a task that appears in both Low priority and Low bliss score: something you rated as unimportant, disliked doing, and did for hours anyway. That is the single clearest candidate for change in the whole app, and it is usually something nobody asked you to do.

The opposite pairing is worth as much. A task in High bliss score with a small duration is work that reliably goes well and keeps getting squeezed. It does not need fixing — it needs defending.

Turning a finding into a change

An insight is only worth the change it causes. For anything in the low tables:

• Can it stop? The best outcome, and more often available than it looks.
• Can someone else do it? Especially if it is low priority and you dislike it.
• Can it be batched? Several small draining blocks scattered through a week usually cost more than the same work done in one sitting.
• Can it move? The same task at a different time of day can score very differently. Reports will tell you whether it already does.

Then check back in a fortnight. Bliss Balance on the dashboard is where you will see whether it worked.

An empty page

With nothing tracked in the selected range, all four tables read No data.

They need a handful of tracked, rated entries in the selected range before they say anything. If the page looks empty but you know you have tracked, widen the date range first — a leaderboard of your last five days is mostly noise anyway.

7. Roles, projects and tags

These three are the labels you track against. You can create them on the fly from the tracker, but each has a page under Manage in the sidebar where you can see and tidy the whole set.

All three pages work the same way: a create form at the top, a searchable table below, and a pencil and trash icon on every row.

Roles

A role is which hat you are wearing: Engineer, Parent, Volunteer, Head of the household admin.

Give it a name and a Type:

• Personal
• Work
• Relationship

The type is not decoration. It is what drives the Hours by life area chart on your dashboard, which splits every tracked hour into those three bands. Time on a task whose role has no type shows up as Not set, so it is worth typing every role you make.

Roles are the label that pays off fastest. A week of tracking with roles set will tell you the actual split between your work and the rest of your life, which is usually the first genuinely surprising thing BlissCompass shows you.

Projects

A project is a named body of work with a beginning and an end: Q3 launch, House move, Certification.

Name and an optional description. Use projects for things you will eventually finish and roles for things you will not.

Tags

A tag is a free-form label, and each task can carry one.

Tags are the flexible one, so they are also the easiest to overdo. They work best for a dimension that cuts across your roles and projects — deep-work, meeting, admin, errand. That way you can ask "how much of my week was meetings" regardless of which role or project each meeting belonged to.

Creating, renaming and deleting

Create — fill in the form at the top of the page and press Create. You can also create a role, project or tag directly from the tracker without coming here.

Rename — the pencil on the row. Renaming is safe and applies everywhere, including to entries you recorded before the change.

Delete — the trash icon, with a confirmation. Deleting a role, project or tag does not delete any of your tracked history. The tasks and entries remain and keep their time and ratings; they simply no longer carry that label, and will appear under (Not set) in filters and charts.

So deleting is safe for your data, but it does change your charts: a deleted role's hours move out of its life area and into Not set, retrospectively. If you only want to stop using a label going forward, leaving it in place costs nothing.

How many to have

Fewer than you think. The labels are only useful if you apply them consistently, and consistency collapses once you have to think about which of five similar options to pick.

A workable starting set is three to six roles, a project per active piece of work, and a small handful of tags. You can always add more once you find yourself wanting a distinction that is not there.

8. The browser extension

The Chrome extension is a quick-capture popup. It does one job the web app cannot: it lets you start, stop and rate a block without leaving the page you are working on.

It is the same account and the same data. Start a timer in the extension and it is on your dashboard when you next look.

Installing it

BlissCompass is on the Chrome Web Store:

Install BlissCompass for Chrome

Choose Add to Chrome, then Add extension when the browser asks. It works in any Chromium-based browser that can install from the Web Store — Chrome, Edge, Brave, Arc, Opera.

Once it is installed, pin it: click the puzzle-piece icon in the toolbar, find BlissCompass, and click the pin. You will be clicking it often, and unpinned extensions are two clicks away every time.

Updates arrive on their own. There is nothing to reinstall.

First open

The first time you open the popup it tells you where your data will be stored.

This is the same regional choice described in chapter 1, and it applies to everything you record through the extension. Confirm the region that matches your account. If you already have an account, this must match the region you chose at signup.

Signing in

Your normal email and password. The extension works out which region your account belongs to and connects to the right one.

Sign up and Forgot password? open the web app in a new tab — new accounts and password resets are handled there, not in the popup.

You stay signed in until you sign out, so this is a one-time step.

Tracking

The top half is the tracker, and it works exactly like the one in the web app: a task name, then Role, Project, Tag and priority, the elapsed time, and the green start button.

Press start, work, press stop, and the popup asks how it felt — the same five faces on the same −2 to +2 scale, with the same optional note. See chapter 2 for what the faces mean.

Closing the popup does not stop the timer. It keeps running; reopen the popup to stop it.

Your recent tasks

The lower half lists your recent tasks with their totals, roles, projects, tags and priorities, and a Find a task search box.

Two buttons on each row:

• Load task (the arrow) — loads that task into the tracker above, with all its labels already set. This is the fastest way to start something you do regularly: one click and press play.
• Delete task (the bin) — removes the task and all its entries, after a confirmation.

Click a task to expand it and see its individual entries — each with its date, duration, the face you gave it and the start of your note. The red bin beside an entry deletes just that one.

The footer

Along the bottom: sign out on the left, and on the right two links that open in a new tab — Go to Dashboard for your full web app, and Go to Actwize.

Which one to use

Use the extension for capture and the web app for everything else.

The popup is deliberately small: it has no charts, no filters and no editing beyond deleting. When you want to fix a duration, re-file a task or understand a month, that is Reports and the dashboard.

9. Your account and settings

Settings

Your avatar in the top-right corner opens a menu with Settings, Onboarding and Sign out. Settings is a single form.

Change what you want and press Change. You will see User data updated.

Leave the password fields alone if you are only changing your name — you do not need to retype it.

Your data region

Your account lives in one of two data centres, chosen when you signed up:

• European Union (Frankfurt) — for users who chose I live in Europe.
• International (Dublin) — for everyone else.

Everything you record stays in that region, and it cannot be moved. If you are unsure which one you are in, the browser extension shows it on the data-region notice, and support can confirm it.

A note on the web app: the settings page does not currently display your region, although the support page says it does. The mobile apps show it under Settings → Privacy.

Signing out

The avatar menu → Sign out. On a shared computer, remember the browser extension keeps its own session — sign out there too, from the icon at the bottom-left of the popup.

If you are signed out unexpectedly you will see a yellow banner reading Your session expired. Please sign in again. Nothing has been lost; sign back in.

Deleting your account

Account deletion is available in the iOS and Android apps, under Settings → Delete account…. You type DELETE to confirm.

This permanently removes your account and everything in it: every task, entry, rating and note. It is immediate and cannot be undone.

There is currently no way to delete your account from the web app or the extension. If you do not have the mobile app, email support@blisscompass.com and ask — under GDPR you have the right to erasure regardless of which app you use.

Exporting your data

There is no export feature yet. If you need a copy of your data, contact support.

Privacy in brief

• What you record — task names, roles, projects, tags, durations, ratings and notes — is yours, linked to your account, and used to run the app.
• It is not used for advertising or sold to anyone.
• It stays in the region you chose.

The full policy is at app.blisscompass.com/privacy.

Getting help

The public support page answers the most common questions and gives you an address for everything else.

app.blisscompass.com/support · support@blisscompass.com — a person replies, usually within two business days.

10. Troubleshooting

The public support page covers accounts, data regions, deletion and dictation. This page covers the things people actually get stuck on while using the app.

My dashboard is empty but I know I have tracked things

Almost always the date range. Every chart and table on the dashboard, Reports and Insights answers to the range in the top right, and the default is a short window.

Widen it to Last 30 days and press Apply. Remember that nothing updates until you press it.

The wording tells you which it is. No entries in this range means you have history, just not here — widen the range. Nothing matches these filters means a filter is excluding everything — use Reset in the toolbar. No entries yet means the account genuinely has nothing recorded.

A day shows no bliss score

A day only gets a score if you tracked and rated something on it. Untracked days are not zero — they are absent, and the line chart bridges them with a dash rather than dropping to the bottom.

My score dropped and I do not know why

Your daily score is weighted by duration, so one long draining block moves it much further than several short ones. Chapter 3 explains the arithmetic.

To find the cause: go to Reports, set the range to the days in question, and sort by Duration descending. The answer is usually in the top three rows.

I forgot to start the timer

If the timer is running, click the elapsed time and type the real hours, minutes and seconds, then Save.

If you already stopped it, or never started it, use Reports: find the task, expand it, and edit the entry's duration and date. If the task does not exist yet, track a token block against it and then correct the entry.

An approximate entry beats a missing one — a gap in your history quietly biases every average you look at afterwards.

I stopped the timer by accident

The rating step has a Cancel, but stopping is not reversible. Rate the block you did, then start a new timer for the rest. Two adjacent entries on the same task add up to the same total, so nothing is lost.

I rated something wrong

Reports → find the task → expand it → the pencil beside the entry. You can change the rating, the duration, the date and the note.

A task is in the wrong role or project

Also Reports, but the pencil in the Action column of the task row rather than the one beside an entry. That opens Edit task, and the change applies to every entry ever recorded against it.

Everything is showing up as "Not set"

You are tracking without labels. Set a Role on the tracker before you press start, or fix existing tasks from Reports.

If it is only the Hours by life area chart showing Not set, your roles exist but have no Type. Open Roles and give each one Personal, Work or Relationship.

I deleted a role — did I lose my history?

No. Deleting a role, project or tag never deletes tracked time. The tasks and entries keep their durations and ratings; they just lose that label and show as (Not set).

Deleting a task, on the other hand, deletes all of its entries. That one cannot be undone.

The extension is not showing my tasks

• Check you are signed in — the popup shows the sign-in form if not.
• Check the region matches the one your account was created in.
• Close the popup and open it again. It reloads its data each time.
• Still stuck? Restart the browser. If that does not do it, remove the extension from chrome://extensions and install it again from the Web Store; you will need to sign in once more afterwards.

I cannot sign in

• Invalid login credentials means the email or password is wrong. The message is the same for both, deliberately.
• Too many attempts means you tried too often in a short window. Wait and try again.
• If a sign-in link from an email does not work, it has expired or already been used. Request a new one.
• Still stuck? Use Set a new password on the sign-in screen.

Where is the AI Advisor?

The store listing mentions an AI Advisor. It is not currently available on general accounts, which is why this guide does not cover it.

Something else

Email support@blisscompass.com. Include what you were doing, what you expected, and what happened instead. A real person replies, usually within two business days.