Blog.
Notes on Mac time tracking, lid-down LLM workflows, and reading your own data. Field reports from building Timex.
Looking for a Timing alternative in 2026? The honest switcher's guide
What to check before you switch from Timing to another Mac time tracker: export your history, match the features you actually use, and know the real trade-offs. Prices checked August 2026.
The best Mac time tracking apps in 2026 (prices checked)
Eight Mac time trackers compared with August 2026 prices: Timing, RescueTime, Toggl Track, Rize, ActivityWatch, Qbserve, Chronoid and Timex — local vs cloud, one-time vs subscription.
Timex 1.3.0: calls count, your rules win, and lost time comes back
Calls and videos no longer die at the idle gate. Keyword rules, manual time, CSV export, optional limits, selective tracking, and seven daily backups — each one puts more of the record under your control.
Billable hours on a Mac: bill what you actually worked, not what you remember
Lawyers capture three billable hours out of an eight-hour day. Freelancers aren't better — memory just isn't a record. Here's how to use your Mac's own activity log as evidence: reconcile before you invoice, generate a timesheet PDF in one click, and never send a client's window titles to someone else's cloud.
You already moved your AI on-device. Your time data is the last thing still in the cloud.
2026 is the year local won: Ollama switched to Apple's MLX, Foundation Models shipped in the OS, and 'run it on my own machine' stopped being a hobbyist stance. If you accepted that logic for your models, your time tracker is the obvious next thing to bring home.
Your focus sessions are 13 minutes long now. Mine were too, until I looked.
The AI era made everyone feel more productive while the average focus session shrank to 13 minutes and 7 seconds. Feeling isn't data. Here's what my own honest log showed me — and why the fix isn't another AI feature.
The same log is a weapon when your boss keeps it. Keep your own.
Bossware is having its biggest year yet — workplace monitoring is now standard practice, a market headed past $7 billion. Timex records the same kind of data and uploads none of it, because the difference between surveillance and self-knowledge is who holds the file.
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.