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by wink 2680 days ago
I did something similar and found it to be useless for how I work. I even wrote a second tool in Rust that uses the WINAPI (throwback to 1998 when I last used it). Sure, numbers might be 50% correct, but maybe they're not.

Say I'm supposed to write some code, so the IDE should be the front window. But I get carried away trying to test an edge case, so I spend 4h in a shell doing stuff that's 100% related, but not in the IDE. Not really a contrived example. Or spending 3h in a browser researching something and reading docs and forum posts about $software when I was supposed to write a one liner fix.

TLDR: Didn't work, gave up with it.

1 comments

You can't just automatically use the results - at the end I group them by window title and look at things that are > 5m

Not perfect but decent.

Of course I did some post-processing, didn't really help - for me - as I wrote.

But just take the category "browser usage" as an example.

Semi-relatedly, one reason I hate web apps for "persistent" things that should be standalone, e.g. stuff like Slack or E-Mail. Not only does it not fit my mental model with alt-tabbing, it also lumps this uselessly together like "GUI usage vs CLI", so broad is "browser".

Window titles are recorded by this script. I wonder if you noticed this? You could have pretty decent filters with those, e.g. you can get a result for "time spent reading comments and writing on hackernews". If I use slack in the browser, i can even get the time i spent talking to different people / channels.