What is Reddit's opinion of
ActivityWatch?
From 3.5 billion Reddit comments
➔ ActivityWatch website
By popularity on Reddit, this Service is:
35 reviews of this app found across Reddit:
I'm building ActivityWatch (among other Quantified Self stuff) and have been asking this question as well. We have a web UI that handles it (and we currently use vis.js) but I'd love for something that can be used directly in scripts when prototyping stuff.
Track your time with open source software, similar to WakaTime or ManicTime:
Best part? The program is actually web-based on local host, so you can add it as the home page in your browser. There are a bunch of plug-ins as well. Really chuffed with this
Ticks all your boxes, out of the box.
Have been using it for a few months. As a software dev I like it because there are extensions for common editors and IDEs to get more detailed metrics.
According to ActivityWatch, I have spent 22.5 hours on YouTube and 4 hours on Reddit this month. Last month, it was 51 hours of YouTube and 13 hours of Reddit total. Note that these stats are focused time only, so if I have YouTube or Reddit open on my second monitor but the window isn't in focus (i.e. I'm working) it does not count that time. Assuming an average of, say, 60 hours per month of entertainment time, that's an entire month per year of time that I am focused on just these two sites, not even counting the time I am still watching a video while doing something else.
Adding to this, my stats for this month also include 12 hours of RuneLite (OSRS client), 10 hours of Rambox (Discord, WhatsApp, but also Sonarr, Radarr etc) and almost 5 hours of Plex.
It's quite absurd how much time people actively waste. Imagine spending that time sleeping instead, or just being productive.
Hey, looks like a great study!
I'm building ActivityWatch together with my brother and a guy who's a CS student at University of Helsinki. We'd love to have a chat and talk about our mutual research interests and how we can help advance each others advance the field. Sending you a DM :)
Thank you so much for replying! Sorry I took so long to respond. I don’t have notifications in my Reddit app and missed it. Yea I notice one thing that’s hard is time tracking when you’re not playing through steam or another launcher that tracks. For a while I was using this app procrastitracker
https://strlen.com/procrastitracker/
Its really lightweight, offline, and you can run it in the background and browser. It’ll automatically show you how much time your spending in each app and you can tell it to grow specific apps under tags so you can say this or that is a game and it’ll put it under your total “game” tag time. Not sure if you tried something like this. The other ones I hear thrown around on Reddit are
And
Don’t have as much experience with the last too.
I definitely like the idea of adding the developer or publisher. I had thought why do I need those but it is a cool idea to see if there is a trend in the developers or publishers of the games you like. It probably helps to find new games.
I’m glad that you enjoyed it! I totally get that some people wouldn’t be interested. I feel like I’m also more inclined to create a database because I just enjoy doing it. It’s kind of a “game” in itself ha.
I have another game related post I’m working on. Hopefully that will be up soon! If you ever want to chat game databases let me know!
UsageDirect, you can find on F-droid. Activity watch, you can find on play store. In both you cannot choose how much time is spent in each app.
Yeah, everyone forgets to start the timer sometimes :)
There is Activitywatch which is fully automatic, and open source.
Also open source, though not an automated tracker: TimeTagger has UX to set the start-time of a record in the past. When you start a timer you have the option "started earlier" which will snap to the stop time of the last record. Personally I usually just start the record, and then edit the start time by dragging it in the timeline. You can check out these options in the demo.
Disclaimer: I'm the author of TimeTagger.
Es gibt zumindest Anwendungen für alle Plattformen, ob und wie die Synchronisierung abläuft, kann ich allerdings nicht sagen. Das Schöne ist, dass die Daten nur lokal sind und keine Firma die verkauft.
I manage a staff of people and I have proposed my people recently to use a tool like ActivityWatch, they are not against it, read on.
The intent is not so much to monitor what the employees do but to provide them a pre-filled activity timesheet at their end of day that they can modify at the margin and validate, so to save them time on an essential task they don't value.
We're in Europe, so the DPD would have a strict, complete and independent control over the configuration of the tool for it to achieve the intended goal.
I believe I can make it work and have faithful timesheets that people are cool with.
I feel you. I've been building an open-source time-tracking app for the last 5 years which (so far) has been able to avoid Electron (we still use a web UI, just run in your normal web browser).
However, I almost regret not going the Electron route, due to all the headaches of packaging an app for cross-platform (among other inconveniences). I can really sympathize with devs choosing Electron, despite its issues.
I'm curious, if Electron is a deal-breaker for you, which alternatives do you really have?
Personally, I wouldn't advise tracking your husband's time for him, as it may come across as combative, accusational, etc.
However, maybe you could discuss tracking time personally, and see if he'd be willing.
I personally use a program called ActivityWatch on my cellphone and computer. It allows me to track my time in an automatic, easy to use, and convenient way, that allows me to see how much time I'm spending working(for tracking extra hours at work), as well as goofing off
Si tu te fais chier tu devrais pouvoir installer ca :) https://activitywatch.net/
C'est un truc pour traquer ton utilisation de ton pc, je m'etais installé ca pour voir si "vraiment je glande rien" ou si j'en avais juste l'impression.
Ca fait des jolis graph tout seul, mais tu dois le configurer un peu, ca peut prendre du temps aussi :)
Maybe it not quite answer for you question. There is a Activity watch app that can track all you activity. Included urls. Stores data locally in sqllite. Maybe it usable for you.
The automod removed my comment for just posting the link. So i had to add description.
ActivityWatch is an app that automatically tracks how you spend time on your devices.
It is open source, privacy-first, cross-platform, and a great alternative to services like RescueTime, ManicTime, and WakaTime.
It can be used to keep track of your productivity, time spent on different projects, bad screen habits, or just to understand how you spend your time.
You can use a third-party time tracker, like ActivityWatch, if you are interested in that kind of data. It records which app you were using at a particular moment of time.
As for Emacs, I'd probably just add logging functions to after-init-hook and kill-emacs-hook, perhaps also something with run-with-timer. And there are ActivityWatch & WakaTime plugins for Emacs, which do something like this.
Found this within two minutes of starting to search: https://activitywatch.net/ It's open-source, it has a browser addon to track website usage, and they claim to support Linux. I haven't used it myself, though.
If use your computer or phone a lot, I can recommend ActivityWatch (https://activitywatch.net) which tracks which applications you use and which websites you browse and gives you daily/weekly/monthly report on your usage.
I think this is a common issue once you've learned quite a bit about a field but are unsure about next steps. It's easy to find beginner resources, but filling gaps in your knowledge or finding suitable next steps is harder.
I've had (like many others) a similar idea to OPs in the past but my focus was on building your personal "knowledge tree" (like tech trees in video games) so you get an overview of what's at "the edge of your knowledge" so to speak. Metacademy does this in part, but I'm interested in automating part of the process by leveraging zettlekasten/memex-like journaling (such as Roam) and automated time-trackers (such as ActivityWatch).
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Digital_Manipulation) if you have any questions or concerns.
ActivityWatch is a decent open-source time tracker, which can track editors amongst other things, but that part is not nearly as powerful as WakaTime.
WakaTime, however, despite requiring premium access for viewing the >14 days data in the dashboard, allows users to export this very data to JSON for free. So you can process the data as you like.
I use self-hosted MetaBase to display such things.
I'm building ActivityWatch and we're working on a "bring your own folder synchronizer" solution so that you can use Dropbox, Syncthing, Gdrive, etc (even rsync if you want) to sync your data across devices.
I guess Nomie works a bit differently, but I'm interested in reading the code.
I like the idea of cloud sync where the server is just a generic storage provider (less privacy concern, especially if you can encrypt the data at rest), but I wouldn't want to tie my application to Dropbox.
I'm facing a similar problem as I have some work to finish by early next week. I'm trying to end as much work as possible today, but in case I won't I will go flight mode + ActivityWatch and its browser extension. It's an open-source program that runs in the background and tracks everything that you have open on your pc. You can use it to keep yourself accountable, i.e. if you open Steam or go to reddit it will be registered.
I don't know how Nomie works, but I would assume that it stores all times in UTC (without timezone, this is probably what you have in your exports if you look at the timestamps) and then simply displays the times in your current timezone. This is how we built it in https://activitywatch.net, and I expect our approach to be pretty standard.
Hey guys, nice work! I'm building ActivityWatch and we've gotten a lot of requests for building something similar on top of it. Happy to see you built something that seems to overcome the issues with the alternatives!
I'm a bit (very) disappointed that it's not available for Firefox however. Could you fix it quickly? It really isn't a lot of work (a chrome polyfill here and there and you're done). Feel free to remind me here when it's done ;)
This is the first thing that made me seriously want to implement a keylogger watcher for ActivityWatch.
Did you do anything about the obvious security risk of collecting such sensitive info? (passwords, credit card info, etc.)
Gotcha, thanks!
I'm building https://activitywatch.net/ and we're always looking to help researchers. It's not directly related to sleep (except for the fact that staring at your screen is likely to keep you awake) but if you do have an interest in that type of data, do let me know!
This is awesome, we share a lot of ideas.
I'm building ActivityWatch (https://activitywatch.net/) and have been asking many of the same questions. I obviously don't have time to go through everything in this comment, but we're seeing the same problems and are building ActivityWatch in response to them. But a few:
- We're trying to be local-first (that inkandswitch wrote about) and privacy-first (data is kept on your device).
- Our WIP "sync-with-folder" feature will support Syncthing for automatic sync across devices. (it's what I use)
- I've personally been tracking a lot for over 6 years and have been facing similar issues with exports. I found that GDPR made things easier, because all it took was to threaten legal action and suddenly "I'll look into it" turned to "Here you go" (worked 3 out of 4 tries, I've tried 2 of the 3 before GDPR without any result).
- I am also motivated to build a "complete timeline" of my life and attention, in order to prepare for better human-machine interfaces. I've written some about this is the history chapter of the ActivityWatch docs.
There's a lot more to say, but I'd love to have a call with you at some point to discuss solutions :)
Creator of ActivityWatch here. We think ActivityWatch is getting kinda good, but it doesn't really match the target audience of HubStaff, as we're primarily about tracking yourself and not others.
I don't know about you guys, but I really don't want Oculus/Facebook to know about everything I do on my Quest.
As I've written elsewhere in the thread: I'm building ActivityWatch, an open source cross-platform time tracker, which was built in part because existing time trackers force you to put sensitive data like this on someone else's servers.
We have a sync feature planned that works without relying on a third party, and would provide the same convenience.
They don't have to put any effort on it, it already exists!
I'm building ActivityWatch, an open source cross-platform time tracker which we've released on SideQuest and does what you're asking for in this thread!
I'm building ActivityWatch, an open source cross-platform time tracker which we've released on SideQuest and does what you're asking for in this thread!
I've been using Activity Watch for a few days and it's open source, free, and really good. However, it requires some basic command line skills to use.
[Bitmeter2] Track your monthy/daily internet usage.
[RocketDock] Alternate Desktop Icons
[ActivityWatch] Track your usage on Desktop. What apps, games, you have open for how long.
Mind the time seems to work for me on FF65 w10, what isn't working for you exactly?
You could try Surf clock, it shows things with a ring chart graphic, and you can set the period of time to check. It says they don't store anything on their cloud, only local.
Sadly it's not open source nor available on github.
​
An alternative would be ActivityWatch, which is open source and has a github, but to install it you need to have both the addon and the program to track it (but it also doesn't send anything, it's all local).