Mac Activity Tracker

May 2026AI agentsOpen source

My note from May 27. Vantage was Crawft's first name.

Mac Activity Tracker is a self-installing system that records what I do on my Mac and writes me a graded report every evening.

It combines four trackers, per-app time, a local screen and audio recorder, keystroke and click counts, and per-site browser time, and each night Claude turns the day into one note with Productivity and Focus scores.

I published it on May 21, 2026, and that same evening I opened the conversation that became Crawft.

A graded note lands every evening

I built this for an accountability routine with a friend: each night we'd share an honest account of where the day went. Doing that from memory doesn't work, so I had my Mac keep the record.

Every evening a scheduled job pulls the day's data and Claude writes one note into my Obsidian vault, the notes app I keep everything in. The top is a short summary written to be shared. Under it sits a table: active and idle time, a Productivity score and a Focus score out of 10, deep-work blocks and the main areas of the day. Below that is a full timeline for spotting patterns across weeks.

Four trackers feed one note

No single tracker sees the whole day, so this one stitches four together. ActivityWatch, an open-source time tracker, records exact time per app and when I'm idle. Screenpipe records the screen and audio and reads them on the Mac with text recognition and Whisper transcription, so the AI knows what was on screen as well as which app was open. A small native app I wrote counts keystrokes and clicks without ever logging which keys, and a browser extension adds time per site. All the recording and storage stays on the Mac; only the nightly job sends a summary to Claude. A control script pauses recording on a timer and resumes it by itself.

How a day becomes a note

One command installs it, and it led to Crawft

I published it as a public repo on May 21. Running install.sh sets everything up and prints the few permission clicks macOS won't let a script make, or you can open the folder in Claude Code and say 'Read AGENT.md and set this up for me.' Uninstalling stops the scheduled jobs and leaves every note and recording in place.

That same evening I started the conversation that became Crawft. Crawft asks the same question, what did this day actually go to, for a whole class of students instead of one person.

The public GitHub repo for mac-activity-tracker: folders for docs, engine, templates and watcher, install and uninstall scripts, and the README headline 'Mac Activity Tracker'.

See the code on GitHub

A graded note lands every evening

I built this for an accountability routine with a friend: each night we'd share an honest account of where the day went. Doing that from memory doesn't work, so I had my Mac keep the record.

Four trackers feed one note

One command installs it, and it led to Crawft

That same evening I started the conversation that became Crawft. Crawft asks the same question, what did this day actually go to, for a whole class of students instead of one person.