You probably spend many hours a week behind your computer. But which programs or web pages do you open the most, and when and for how long? How much time do you typically spend on your computer?
You can find out the answers to these questions with ActivityWatch. In short, ActivityWatch is an app that automatically tracks how you spend time on your devices. 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.
For example, if you spend too much time on Facebook or Twitter or some other website or application, you can use your ActivityWatch logs to determine how much time you actually spend on these sites.
In order to be able to monitor the website visit, you will need the ActivityWatch – Open Source Time Tracker add-on for Firefox or the ActivityWatch Web Watcher extension for Chrome.
ActivityWatch is open source, cross-platform, and privacy-friendly. It can be used on Linux, Windows, macOS and Android. The app stores the data on your computer which ensures that privacy is not an issue when it comes to using the app on your devices.
Underlying, the app works with some modules (watchers), that enable ActivityWatch to track your usage. The default watchers are collecting some of the most important data. Of course, there are other watchers available (Editor watchers, Media watchers), which you can get from the official website.
The app comes pre-installed with two watchers, aw-watcher-afk which logs the presence/absence of user activity from keyboard and mouse input and aw-watcher-window which logs the currently active application and it’s window title.
Features
You can use ActivityWatch to:
- Monitor your productivity.
- Track how much time you spend on different projects.
- Get an overview of time spent on apps, games, videos, and music.
- Manage your bad screen habits.
- Measure your work-life balance.
- Find behavioral trends in how you use your devices.
- Keep a log of your digital life.
- Research attention, productivity, and behavior.
For more information about ActivityWatch you can visit the project’s website or you can refer to the official documentation.
Installing ActivityWatch on Linux
If you are using Arch Linux you can install ActivityWatch directly from the AUR.
For all other Linux distributions, you get a ZIP file which includes an aw-qt application to run. You have to extract the zip file into an appropriate directory, and add the aw-qt executable to your autostart applications.
