One of the most annoying daily tasks most developers or project managers have to do is logging time.

The Internet is full of apps helping track time spent in front of the screen. Unfortunately, most of them are built to spy on you or to make a business out of data about your behavior.

I've spent hours researching different tools to help me manage time and attention and log time spent on different projects. I needed an app capable of automatically tracking what programs and tabs I'm actively using on my computer and being serious about privacy.

When it comes to time tracking, there is 1 app I can't live without:

ActivityWatch

And here's why:

• Monitoring productivity and attention allows for gaining self-knowledge from numbers, discovering patterns, and managing your bad screen habits,

• It Helps track time spent on different projects, and makes it easier to log time when switching contexts during the day,

• Track how you spend time writing code: integrates nicely with popular IDEs,

• Cross-platform: Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android.

• Privacy / Security / GPDR: Data is stored locally and doesn't leave your device,

• API allows easy integration with other tools or automation and further analysis of the data. Being open-source allows extending it and even building products on top

If you want to learn more about yourself, improve attention management, and make logging time less painful (without having to start/stop the timer for every task) I can't recommend using ActivityWatch enough.