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Linear Integration

Chronoid automatically tracks which apps, documents, and websites you use on your Mac throughout the day, building a detailed timeline without asking you to start or stop a timer. Linear, meanwhile, has no time tracking of its own. Connecting the two closes that gap from both ends: your Linear issues become suggestions while you log time on your Mac, and your tracked time can be summarized back onto the issue your team is looking at.

Create a Personal API Key

  1. In Linear, open Settings → API → Personal API keys.
  2. Create a key and copy it.

In Chronoid, open Settings → Integrations → Linear, paste the key, and click Test Connection. Chronoid verifies the key and shows the workspace it reached. The key is stored in your Mac’s Keychain, never in a plain settings file, and is only ever sent to Linear.

Choose Which Teams to Import

Linear organizes work by Team, and that is what Chronoid imports from. A whole workspace would flood your suggestions with issues you will never track against, so nothing is imported until you pick the teams you actually work in. Narrow further with:

  • Only issues assigned to me — skip everything on someone else’s plate.
  • Include completed issues — off by default, so finished work stays out of your suggestions.
  • Only issues updated in the last — 7, 30, or 90 days, or any time.

Only issues assigned to me is on by default, so a first import brings in your own work rather than the whole team’s.

The first import runs the moment the integration is ready — as soon as you have a token and at least one team selected — so your issues are there when you go to use them, rather than at the next background cycle. Import now re-runs it whenever you want.

After that Chronoid refreshes in three ways:

  • In the background, roughly every 15 minutes, and shortly after your Mac wakes, so a laptop opened in the morning is not working from yesterday’s list.
  • When you focus a time entry’s title field — the moment before you type the query the list has to answer — so an issue assigned to you two minutes ago is already offered. This is throttled to at most once a minute, so ordinary editing costs nothing.
  • On demand, via Import now.

Chronoid asks Linear only for issues that changed since the last run, so a large workspace costs very little; the full pass that also drops issues which disappeared upstream runs at most once a day.

The pane shows how many issues are cached and when the last import finished.

Imported issues surface in one place: the title field of a time entry.

  1. Start a time entry and begin typing in What did you work on?
  2. Matching issues appear beneath the field, each shown by its Linear identifier and title — ENG-431 Redesign onboarding flow.
  3. Pick one. Chronoid fills in the title and attaches a link to that issue.

The link is a real reference, not just copied text, and it survives editing the title afterwards. To leave an entry unlinked, keep typing and ignore the suggestions — nothing is linked implicitly. Every editor that writes a time entry offers the same autocomplete, so it does not matter whether you created the entry from the timeline, the menu bar, or an idle-time prompt.

Send Tracked Time Back to Linear

Turn on Send my tracked time to Linear under Send time back. Chronoid asks you to confirm first, because this writes into a workspace your teammates can see.

Because Linear has nowhere to store a time entry, Chronoid records your time as an attachment on the issue. The issue sidebar shows the headline — 3h 20m tracked — and opening the attachment shows the work behind it:

  • A summary: total tracked, number of entries, and the first and last dates you worked on it.
  • A breakdown of every entry, newest first, each with its duration, time range, title, and notes.

An issue worked over months would run to hundreds of rows, so the breakdown lists the 50 most recent entries and states how many more are behind the total.

Three rules hold:

  • Only entries you linked to a Linear issue are ever sent. Unlinked time, your raw timeline, window titles, and browsing history never leave your Mac.
  • One attachment per issue, updated in place. Chronoid does not add a second copy when your time changes, so an issue you have worked on for weeks still carries exactly one Chronoid attachment.
  • The attachment is removed if the time goes away. Delete or unlink every entry for an issue and Chronoid takes the attachment down rather than leaving a stale total behind.

Renaming an entry or editing its notes updates the attachment too, not just changing its duration — the breakdown would otherwise go quietly out of date.

Updates are sent within a few seconds of you writing or editing an entry, so the issue is current by the time you switch to Linear to look at it. The 15-minute background cycle stays as a backstop for anything that could not be sent at the time — a running entry, or a request Linear rejected.

Disconnecting

Disconnect removes the API key from your Keychain and clears the cached issues. Time entries you already linked keep their link, so reconnecting later restores them.

For help, email support@chronoid.app

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