Daily – Hours & Time Tracker 4+

This is the app I've been looking for.

This is maybe my first app review of all time. I love this time tracker. I have ADHD and suffer from a thing called "time blindness," where my conception of time is just almost always wrong. I also have a really hard time switching tasks, or stepping back to evaluate what I'm doing, and whether I need to change course. When I was self-employed, I used toggl to record my own "time card," but now I need a time tracker mainly to satisfy my own curiosity, keep track of my activities in a low-key way, and have the ability to assess (roughly) how I'm spending my time without "time tracking" taking up big chunks of mental bandwidth (and time!!) This is it. The moment I installed it and the tiny pop-up asked me what I'd been doing, I almost cried with relief. It's so easy. You don't have to remember to look at the time whenever you switch activities, and mess around with your tracker. Your tracker notices this for you, and asks. It helps me track my time without becoming another "thing" I have to do.

Developer Response ,

Thanks for your kind review!

Nicely built and perfectly minimal tracking tool.

I've been wary of the sample based/popup approach to tracking, but the developers have clearly taken care to make Daily Time Tracker unintrusive and fluid to use. The AppleScript integration is a nice touch, although it could use more documentation.

I especially appreciate the developer's privacy policy. As of writing activities are locally stored, and personal data isn't shared with anyone (increasingly rare, needless to say). I'm happy to pay for a solid product that doesn't make its money slinging my data.

The only thing I've felt is missing is sync across machines. I use multiple Macs throughout the day, and it would be useful to continue tracking when switching. It would be great if this could be done in a way that wouldn't detract from the privacy, say using iCloud Drive instead of a remote database. Or just adding an AppleScript action to import data could let users tinker this together themselves.

Just the pesky remining I need

I bounce around from task to task so frequently, that I find it impossible to stay sufficiently-disciplined at tracking my per-task time. Although the regular popping-up of this app's "what are you working on" is a bit pesky, it's the only thing I've found that makes sure I'm tracking the right thing. And the stats at the end of the day are not only good for billable hours, but for getting a sense of my overall workflow and efficiency. I would like to see some (mostly) cosmetic improvement to the interface, primary of which is a visual indicator of (green dot, radio button?) of the task that's currently being tracked, and a stop/play or green/red button for enable/disable tracking (as opposed to the dropdown menu). I'd love an app that could automatically track the names of the window/file I'm on, as then I wouldn't need the pop-up reminder, but I strongly suspect that would be a much more complicated program, and so I say again, this is the only thing I've found that works.

Developer Response ,

Thanks for your review! Note that there's no "active" activity that gets tracked. Daily works by sampling (activities) and calculates your timesheets based on the input you provide. Hence, there's no need for such a visual indicator. We are considering enhancing Daily by automatically applying activities based on the window/file you are working in/with. Would be an exciting feature indeed!