I tend to weigh up different systems and applications I use every once in a while. Especially weighing up the benefits to me.
One such application is Rescue time.
I used it in the past and over the last few months reinstalled it again. However this time I tried to automate the reports out of the free account and pretty much failed. The only way I could really do it is if I paid for the pro account at the cost of (a discounted) $6.75 per month.
So enough I thought… A little look around alternative to and decided to give Activity Watch a try.
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 help you keep track of time spent on different projects, kick bad screen habits, or just understand how you spend your time.
Its pretty good and doesn’t drain my laptop while watching my laptop. Of course being local and under my control only, I don’t really need to worry so much about whats collected. You can of course limit things as you go, turn off tracking or just delete the data any time.
I have it on my Dell XPS laptop and on my work phone and its good except one thing. Currently there is no sync server, so each device has its own server. But they are working on this… Once they do, I’ll likely install it on my server and put the client on more of my devices.
The other thing I’m hoping for is to see more use of the stopwatch activity watch bucket (buckets are the pools of data collected). Since Project hamster is currently being rethought and I like to track my work progress alongside my activity.
As a whole the project has a lot of potential and worth the wait I hope for the features expressed above.
