Blog.
Notes on Mac time tracking, lid-down LLM workflows, and reading your own data. Field reports from building Timex.
Timex 1.2.0: the productivity score I said I'd never ship
Timex was the tracker that refused to score you. 1.2.0 ships a Focus Score anyway — but you write the rubric, it runs on your Mac, and nobody sells the number back to you.
A time tracker that knows the difference between Claude Code and Slack
I asked Claude Code to refactor a service. Half an hour later I was on Twitter. The tracker caught me. Here's how Timex sees the developer workflow — IDE, terminal, AI tools, browser, chat — and what the data tells you about your actual day.
Tracking time on local LLM and ML runs (when your Mac is doing the work, not you)
Wall-clock vs compute time, what Timex sees when Ollama spends three hours generating tokens, and how the SQLite file plus clamshell mode let you reconstruct exactly when your model finished — without trusting your memory.
Why a time tracker belongs in the menu bar — and what fits in 220 pixels
A dock app demands attention. A menu bar app sits where you already look. The design choices behind the Timex pill: what we put in, what we left out, and why every pixel had to defend itself.
Automatic time tracking on Mac, explained — and why manual timers don't work
What 1 Hz sampling actually captures, how Timex writes app focus, window titles, and browser tabs into a local SQLite file, and why every manual timer experiment ends in reconstructed-from-memory data by Wednesday.
Break timers that pause when you do — and why most of them don't
Pomodoro chopped up my best focus blocks for two years. Here's what a break timer should actually do, and the seven exercise types we ship in Timex.
Timex 1.1.0: five languages and a ZIP file
Two features shipped in this release. Both come from the same insight: the app was mine until you installed it, and after that, it's yours.
Why your Mac time tracker shouldn't be a subscription
Five-year math on every major time tracker, why subscriptions fit the web era, and why a Mac app on your laptop is the wrong product to charge monthly.
Run Ollama in clamshell mode without your Mac going to sleep
How macOS handles closed-lid sleep, why local LLMs need the Mac awake, and the simplest way to keep both happy — without buying yet another menu bar app.
I built a time tracker that doesn't track me
Why I started Timex: a manifesto for local-first, automatic activity tracking — and the tradeoffs of skipping the cloud and the manual stopwatch.