Tutorial
What the Session Timer Tells You About Your Knitting
RowTally records how long each counting session lasted, without you starting or stopping anything. On its own that is a mildly interesting number. Combined with your row count, it answers questions that are otherwise pure guesswork.
How long will this actually take?
Once you have a few sessions recorded, you know your real rate for this project — say 60 rows an hour on plain stockinette, 25 on a cable chart.
A 300-row blanket at 60 rows an hour is five hours of work. That is a genuine answer, and it is usually both better and worse than the guess: fewer total hours than feared, but more calendar weeks, because nobody knits five hours in a sitting.
Pricing work honestly
If you sell what you make, guessed hours are how makers end up working for well below minimum wage. The yarn cost is easy; the time is what gets underestimated.
Recorded sessions give you a defensible number: this hat took four hours and twenty minutes across three sittings. Price from that and you can explain the price, to a customer and to yourself.
Spotting what actually slows you down
Compare rate across projects and the pattern gets obvious. Charted work is slower than plain. Sessions after 10pm produce fewer rows and more mistakes. The project you keep picking up for eleven minutes at a time barely moves at all.
None of that is a moral failing — it is scheduling information. Once you can see that short sessions produce almost nothing, it is easier to justify protecting a longer one.
Reading it without turning it into a chore
A caveat, since this is a hobby for most people: a timer that makes you feel monitored is a timer worth ignoring. It runs whether or not you look at it, and there is no streak to maintain and no target to miss.
The number is there for the moments when it is useful — quoting a commission, deciding whether a Christmas deadline is realistic, understanding why a project stalled. The rest of the time, ignore it entirely.
Frequently asked questions
Do I have to start and stop the session timer?
No. It runs with your counting session automatically and records the duration without any action from you.
How do I work out my rows per hour?
Divide the rows completed in a session by its duration. Do it across a few sessions of the same project, since the first session of anything charted is always slower than the fifth.
Does the timer keep running if I put the app in the background?
The timer measures your counting session rather than wall-clock time all day, so leaving the app does not accumulate hours you did not work. Check a couple of sessions against a clock if you plan to bill from the numbers.