Have you ever wondered how much time do you spend reading emails, browsing on internet or hacking? I have! I started thinking about monitoring my activity. Reason for this was that I work from home, where I’m alone and nobody is behind my back watching what I’m actually doing. So I came with an idea to write a simple applet which tracks the time you spent in a certain application by just checking your currently active window (application). The functionality is pretty simple, you switch focus to a window where you do something, the applet starts measuring the time and update it in some interval until you switch to another window and so on. It may not be accurate in case you will be cheating, e.g. you open a video player and start watching a movie while you switch focus to another app to avoid monitoring time spent in the video player. Given this, the purpose of the applet is pretty obvious, it should be just for you, for your personal usage when you have no reason for cheating, because you are interested in these statistics.

Here are screenshots of the current version:

The applet has a compact version which you can put into your panel, it shows the current active window and the time you spent in there. Once you click on it, it will popup a window showing a list of all applications you used ordered by usage. To extend the basic functionality I added buttons to start/stop monitoring, a button to reset the current statistics (there are even options to reset the statistics on suspend/reset/shutdown in applet configuration) or buttons to blacklist applications you don’t care about.

For those who are interested in trying this little project of mine or they want to contribute and extend it, fix something or report an issue, here’s the link.