A big chunk of my time is spent at the computer, also during my downtime, and there is no clear separation between study, chores, entertainment, etc. Work happens at other computers, where time flies by sometimes at ridiculous speeds. I often find myself wondering where did my day/week go?

For some time I've been using a badly-cobbled-together solution with Bash scripts doing a few basic operations, all the time:

Detect when the screen saver is active (AFk).
Capture the id and title of the active windown (when not AFK).
Store those details in plain-text log files.
Aggregate those by window id into CSV files.
Import CSV files into a spreadsheet to clean it up.

The results have been barely enough to keep track of where my weeks go, which has already been a relief; when someone (often me) asks "why so little progress on X?", I can check the spreadsheet and answer with numbers: because this week, out of 40 hours, ...

At home, however, the results have been very underwhelming. This is due to completely different behaviour patterns, which is where I hope ActivityWatch will help.

Installation

To install ActivityWatch on Ubuntu (and other Debian-based systems) one can simply install the .deb package provided as part of ActivityWatch releases:

$ wget -S \
    https://github.com/ActivityWatch/activitywatch/releases/download/v0.13.1/activitywatch-v0.13.1-linux-x86_64.deb
$ sudo dpkg -i activitywatch-v0.13.1-linux-x86_64.deb

Once installed, make sure /opt/activitywatch/aw-qt is run when logging into the desktop session. For instance, in KDE Plasma, add ActivityWatch in the Autostart section of System Setting: click + Add... then Add Application... then enter the name (ActivityWatch) and it should be available under Utilities.

While ActivityWatch is running, the web UI is available at http://localhost:5600/. After about 2 hours of having this running, while going about my business, I can see it's already capturing my activities just as messing about with audiobooks and learning languages:

Configuration

As noted by ActivityWatch itself, 65% of the time today is uncategorized, and this can be addressed by using the Category Builder.

At first nothing shows up in the Categorization Helper, because it defauls to the unknown hostname. Click on Show options and select the appropriate hostname, then a list of common words show with their associated times:

New categories can be added here to match these words, but in this section the UI does not allow creating new parent categories:

Following the link to the Settings page one can create a whole new branch, e.g. here a new Learning root category is created for all activites related to learning and studying:

To create additional categories, it is useful to follow the Uncategorized link under Top Categories in the dashboard, to see what makes up most of the uncategorized time. For instance, here it is clear that most of the time is spent in activities related to Audiobooks:

After a few more tweaks and, of course, finding the dark theme in the Setting, this is finally looking much better:

Additional Wathers

A number of Watchers are available for more accurate tracking. Sadly, none of the following worked out.

Steam

aw-watcher-steam attempts to log the timeline of Steam game activity by fetching play time from the Steam API.

Installating is easy enough:

$ git clone https://github.com/Edwardsoen/aw-watcher-steam.git
$ cd aw-watcher-steam/
$ pip install .
...
Successfully installed aw-client-0.5.13 aw-core-0.5.16 aw-watcher-steam-0.0.1 charset-normalizer-3.3.2 deprecation-2.1.0 iso8601-1.1.0 peewee-3.17.5 persist-queue-0.8.1 platformdirs-3.10.0 requests-2.32.3 rfc3339-validator-0.1.4 strict-rfc3339-0.7 timeslot-0.1.2

Or may be note, see Issue #4: How to install? where no conclusive answer has been found. In particular, marcinsmialek's comment points out this watcher does not making any easier to group all games under a parent category (can't find a way to add a rule that would match the Steam games in general). Thus, this watcher seem to only provide better names for the same activities.

Media Player

Media Player watcher captures information about media playback. It supports any player which can report its status to the system and be controllable by tray or standard multimedia keys.

This is an interesting watcher, just not so much if one is more interested about traking time "watching movies" or "listining to X" rather than tracking time spent on each piece of video or audio.

VS Code

It would be good to have better reporting in some areas, for instance working in VS Code. Sadly, aw-watcher-vscode is not available in code-server for the Web, and ActivityWatchVS is not even found at all.

Appendix

This is the script that does steps 1-3 above, added here for reference because it has a few interesting bits. Aggregating this data is rather trivial so not really interesting.

``` bash numlines="1"

!/bin/bash

Poll every second for the name of the active window.

LDIR="${HOME}/activitylogs" TSTM="$(date +'%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M-%S')" LOGF="${LDIR}/${TSTM}.txt"

mkdir -p "${LDIR}" while true; do # Skip if screen is locked (KDE Plasma) if qdbus org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver /ScreenSaver org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver.GetActive 2>/dev/null | grep -q true; then continue fi # Take a screenshot, but only if the screen is not locked. if dbus-send --session --dest=org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver --type=method_call --print-reply /org/freedesktop/ScreenSaver org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver.GetActive 2>/dev/null | grep -q 'boolean false'; then continue fi # Skip if screen is locked (XFCE) if dbus-send --session --dest=org.xfce.ScreenSaver --type=method_call --print-reply /org/xfce/ScreenSaver org.xfce.ScreenSaver.GetActive 2>/dev/null | grep -q true; then continue fi wid=$(xdotool getwindowfocus -f) if [[ -z "${wid}" ]]; then continue fi wname=$(xdotool getwindowname "${wid}") echo "${wid} ${wname}" >>"${LOGF}" sleep 1 done ```