One project per activity, the show as the description. That is the whole system.

I started tracking my Korean in Toggl on February 7, 2021, after a Korean YouTuber asked me how many hours I had done and I had to guess. My first categories were rough: passive listening, sleep listening, active streaming. They became a project per activity, and every entry got the exact show or channel.

On January 1, 2022, I posted my 2021 numbers in the Refold Korean server: 3,790 hours, with about 1,300 of Active Listening, 1,212 of Passive Listening, 804 of Active Subtitles, 246 of SRS and 194 of Reading. Someone in the thread said they had registered for Toggl but were confused, and asked how to set it up. My answer is below.

A few days later another learner replied that they had been tracking everything under one project and adding up each activity by hand. One project per activity, they wrote, made so much more sense. That is the core of the method.

My first instruction: "I recommend getting all three platforms of Toogl Track installed to your devices." That means the website, the browser extension, the desktop app for Windows or Mac, and the phone app. Toggl's free plan syncs all of them, so a timer you start on your phone shows up on your laptop.

This matters more than it sounds. Immersion happens everywhere: a podcast on the bus, a drama on the TV, Anki in bed. The fewer steps between "I'm starting" and a running timer, the more of your real time ends up in the record. As I wrote in that thread: "no matter what device you started your timer on you can stop it from anywhere you are logged in."

This is the step most people get wrong. Don't make a project called "Korean" and put everything in it. Make one project per kind of immersion. As I put it then: "I recommend using projects as the overlaying activities you do/want to track in your immersion."

Start with the six you do every day. Add the three output projects when you start speaking and writing, not before. You can create a project any time, including from the project drop-down while you start a new entry. Give each one its own colour so the report reads at a glance.

When you start immersing, press start. When you finish, press stop. That is the daily habit, and it takes two seconds. If you forget, add the entry afterward with the real start and stop time, the same day.

The description is where the method gets good. My rule: "if its a show, book, or movie, I use the name (ex. 이태원 클래쓰, 인간수업...) for the activity description. As for YouTube/Twitch I do it by Youtube channel." So the entry is "Itaewon Class" in Active Subtitles, or "Clark TV" in Active Listening, never just "Netflix" or "YouTube".

Once a show is in Toggl, you rarely type it in full again. From the same answer: "Toggl remembers your previous activities, which popup if you type a single character of the activity, making it easy to get it started plus cleaner on tracking in the Toggl report feature." Pick the suggestion and it comes with its project. The second half of that sentence is why spelling matters: one show spelled three ways is three rows in your report.

Once a week, open Reports in Toggl, go to the Summary tab and set the date range to this week. Three parts of the page do the work: the bar chart by day, the breakdown by project, and the total.

Toggl is a time tracker for freelancers and teams. It is very good at that, it is free for one person, and the method above works. But it doesn't know what language learning is, so a few things are yours to build and keep up.

I built Immersed after years of tracking in Toggl, and it shows. The nine activities in Immersed (Active Listening, Passive Listening, Active Subtitles, Reading, Study, SRS, Speaking, Writing and Shadowing) are the nine Toggl projects from my 2022 guide, standardized so nobody has to build them. On a computer, the session bar even works like Toggl: start, stop, or switch to manual mode.

The difference is what each entry carries. A session in Immersed is one of the nine activities, the actual show, channel or book, the minutes, and a rating of how much you understood. That is the point of the whole method: hours are one-dimensional, and what you did in those hours is the thing. Two learners with 1,000 hours can be in very different places, depending on the mix of activities and how much of it they could follow.

Reports follow from that. Growth in Immersed stacks each day by activity, lays your comprehension over time, shows a consistency grid with your streak, and lists your top shows and channels with links back to them. Toggl reports vs Immersed reports compares them in detail.

My own Toggl routine on YouTube was to copy the video or channel title, switch to Toggl, paste it and press start. Immersed for Chrome takes those steps out. It is on the Chrome Web Store, unlisted for now, and works in Chrome, Edge, Brave and Arc.

On YouTube, the Immerse button under the video starts a session with that video in one click. On 73 other media sites, Netflix, Viki, Spotify, webtoon sites and NHK among them, an Add button captures the title, picture and language for you. A session pill follows you from tab to tab. Nothing starts on its own: every session starts with a press, and Immersed never reads your viewing history. Saving and sessions need Immersed Pro.

You don't lose a single hour by moving. Immersed imports Toggl CSV files, and a setup built with this guide maps across almost by itself, because your projects already have the activity names.

One thing to check on Toggl's side first: their help center says CSV export is a paid plan feature and the free plan exports PDF only. Export your time entries as CSV from the Detailed report, for the whole range you want.