macOS app · 2026
Timeglass
A focus tracker for macOS that measures the thing Screen Time structurally cannot: how long a window was actually in front of you, awake, with you present.
What it is
Timeglass sits in the background on a Mac and records which window or tab held the foreground, for how long, while the machine was awake and someone was actually there. It writes everything to a single SQLite file on your own disk and serves a dashboard at 127.0.0.1. Nothing leaves the machine.
Why I built it
I wanted to know where my hours were going and every existing answer was wrong in the same way. Screen Time counts a Chrome window as one blob called "Chrome". Browser history proves a page loaded, not that you read it. Neither can tell the difference between four hours of deep work and four hours of an idle tab. The measurement I wanted did not exist, so I built the instrument.
How it works
A small daemon polls the frontmost application and tab title, folds consecutive samples into sessions, and drops the session when the display sleeps or the machine idles. The dashboard reads straight from the database and renders the day, the week, and the drift between what you planned and what you did.
Where it stands
Running on my machine every day. The gap between a private tool and a product people can install is mostly packaging, code signing, and a payment path, which is what the billing kit exists to solve.