ActivityWatch

"How did I get nothing done again today?" Most people estimate their own time use badly. Manual logging fails because you cannot remember, and commercial automatic trackers — especially the kind installed by employers — ship every click to someone else's servers.

ActivityWatch is the third road between those: automatic recording with the data staying entirely on your machine. 18,589 stars, MPL-2.0.

It runs several "watchers" in the background:

• Window watcher: the active window's application name and title, and how long it held focus.
• Browser extension: the URL of the active tab, so "three hours in a browser" resolves into an hour of documentation and two hours of video.
• AFK detection: recognizes when you left the keyboard so idle time is not counted as work.
• Community editor plugins for VS Code, Vim and others record which project and file consumed the time.

The data feeds a web dashboard: most-used applications, most-visited sites, time distributed across categories you define (work, leisure, communication) and a timeline of the day. Categorization rules are yours, matched by regular expression against application names and window titles.

Its privacy architecture is the core of the pitch and worth spelling out:

• Data lives in a local SQLite database you can open, export or delete yourself.
• The server binds to localhost only and is not externally reachable by default.
• No account, no cloud, no telemetry, and open source so it can be audited.
• An optional sync feature exists, but it syncs between your own devices.

That is fundamentally different from employer-issued monitoring software — this one reports to you, not about you.

To be clear about:

• Releases are infrequent. The current stable version, v0.13.2, dates from October 2024 while the repository saw continuing commits through 2026. The functionality is stable and usable, but set expectations if you like seeing frequent releases.
• It records without intervening. There is no site blocking or forced focus mode; it gives you data, and changing habits remains your job.
• Window titles can contain sensitive information such as document names or chat contacts. The data is local, but on a shared computer set exclusion rules or pause recording for sensitive work.
• The Android version is simpler, mainly logging app usage duration.

If you genuinely want to answer where your time goes without handing that record to any company, there is currently little better.