Simple way to know what I'm doing on my Mac, hour-by-hour

July 11, 2006 10:39 AM

I am trying to manage my time a little better, and I would like a way to automatically track what I do on my Mac - how many minutes daily I spend in various applications, along with, possibly, a breakdown of documents and web pages by time, as well. I don't want to enter anything manually, or use this for billing or anything similar. Does anyone know of such an application (especially one that is inexpensive or free - many of the programs that do this are aimed at business and billing, and quite costly.) Other suggestions on how to accomplish this are also welcome.
posted by soulbarn to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

I think it very likely that you're looking for something like Titrax. The linked version is for the Palm Pilot, but the original was for Unix, and ought not to be *too* hard to port to OS/X, if indeed someone hasn't already done it.

GnoTime reportedly works on the Mac as well, though it might be too complicated for what you want to do.

Or not.
posted by baylink at 10:48 AM on July 11, 2006

Active Timer is free, and will track by application, but not per document.
posted by Rifkin at 11:06 AM on July 11, 2006

There's a built in command line utility called 'time' that will report how long an application takes to execute. You could just load all your programs from the command line and keep track of time spent on them that way.
posted by triolus at 11:11 AM on July 11, 2006

I downloaded Active Timer to check it out, and it actually does support time tracking for each document. It asks you to change a preference in the Universal Access control panel, but then seemingly will function as requested.
posted by bcnarc at 11:17 AM on July 11, 2006

Onlife is an application for the Mac OS X that observes your every interaction with apps such as Safari, Mail and iChat and then creates a personal shoebox of all the web pages you visit, emails you read, documents you write and much more. Onlife then indexes the contents of your shoebox, makes it searchable and displays all the interactions between you and your favorite apps over time.
posted by the giant pill at 11:18 AM on July 11, 2006

Response by poster: boy, Onlife is great - all the features I wanted, free, and very nice interface. Only flaw: it only tracks applications for which plug-ins have been written. Those include the standard suite of Mac apps, plus popular apps like Firefox and MS Word, but not some of the other apps I use, like Nisus or Circus Ponies Notebook. Writing the plug-ins is beyond my skill level, but there is an active community that is doing so. The developer also says that he's working on a feature that would simply track any open apps (as i write this, Onlife - it is a beta - just crashed...)

I think this one has amazing potential, and much of the requested functionality now. But Active Timer does it all now - much more simply, which could be an advantage.
posted by soulbarn at 11:35 AM on July 11, 2006

Can anyone recommend something similar for Windows?
posted by ajr at 2:37 PM on July 11, 2006

I use Minuteur, but it isn't very featureful.
posted by evariste at 4:14 PM on July 11, 2006