A recruiter friend told me last month that the first thing candidates ask her now isn't salary. It's whether the company installs monitoring software. She didn't have that question a year ago.

I understand why it's suddenly on the list. Monitoring crossed from something a few paranoid firms did into standard operating procedure: by Gartner's 2025 count, 94% of companies with remote or hybrid teams now run monitoring software, up from 60% in 2020. It stopped being a statistic and became a thing that happens to you personally when you take a job. The employee-monitoring market was around $3.3 billion in 2024 and is on track to more than double by decade's end. That growth isn't coming from companies that already watched their staff buying a second product. It's coming from the ones who didn't, starting.

And the tools got worse while they got more common. Not just which app is open — keystroke cadence, idle detection, webcam attention checks, screenshots on an interval, in a few genuinely dystopian cases heart rate. The polite word the vendors use is "productivity intelligence." Everyone else calls it bossware.

So here's the uncomfortable thing I have to say about my own app, up front: Timex records a lot of the same data these tools do. Which app had focus. For how long. Window titles. Which website was open in the browser tab. Second by second. If you lined up a Timex database next to a bossware export, the raw columns would look related.

The difference is the only thing that matters, and it isn't a feature. It's a question. Who holds the file?

The data was never the problem

We keep arguing about workplace surveillance as if the sin were the collection. It isn't. A log of your own day is one of the most useful things you can own. It settles the argument with yourself about where Tuesday went. It shows you the meeting that quietly ate every morning this quarter. It's the raw material for actually working less, not more.

The sin is the direction. When you keep the log, it's a mirror. When your employer keeps it and you can't see it, it's a one-way glass, and everything on the other side of that glass gets used in a conversation you're not in — the performance review, the layoff math, the "we noticed you were idle for 47 minutes on Thursday."

That's why 42% of monitored workers, in one 2026 survey, said they plan to quit within the year, and why small businesses that rolled out invasive tracking watched turnover roughly triple. People aren't fleeing the data. They're fleeing the asymmetry. The number that describes your day is doing work against you, in a room you can't enter.

California's legislature saw enough of this to pass the "No Robo Bosses Act" (SB 7) in 2025 — a bill to stop employers from letting automated systems discipline or fire people without a human in the loop. Governor Newsom vetoed it as overbroad. Senator McNerney reintroduced a narrower version, SB 947, on February 2nd this year. Whatever happens to the bill, the fact that it keeps coming back tells you the asymmetry is now a legislative problem, not just a Glassdoor complaint.

What "uploads none of it" actually means

I built Timex so the file points the other way. Everything it records lands in one SQLite file on your Mac. Not a synced folder that happens to live on your Mac. Not an encrypted blob it phones home "for backup." A plain database at a path you can open, copy, inspect with any SQLite browser, and delete. The number that describes your day is a file you own outright, the way you own a text document.

Zero bytes leave the machine. No account. No email at signup. No telemetry, not even the anonymous kind that most "privacy-respecting" apps still send. There's no server for your data to be subpoenaed from, breached out of, or quietly re-priced into a subscription, because there's no server. You don't have to trust me about this the way you'd have to trust a cloud vendor — you can watch the network yourself with Little Snitch or macOS's own tools and see nothing going out. Distrust is welcome here. It's the whole design.

That single decision is what separates a self-tracker from bossware, and it cascades into everything else. There's no admin dashboard, because there's no admin — the software has exactly one user and it's the person sitting at the keyboard. There's no way for anyone to enroll your Mac into a fleet. There's no "manager view." I couldn't build those features on top of Timex if I wanted to, because the data they'd need never exists anywhere I could reach.

Self-surveillance is a different verb

Someone always pushes back here: isn't a tool that watches your every app just bossware you point at yourself? Stockholm-syndrome productivity?

No, and the reason is the same asymmetry, run in reverse. When you hold the log, you decide what it means. Timex ships a Focus Score, but you write the rubric — every category's weight is yours to drag from "deep focus" to "pure waste," and if you think a two-hour rabbit hole on Wikipedia was the best thing you did all week, you set it to count that way. Nobody grades you. There's no streak to protect, no weekly email declaring your Tuesday a failure, no badge. You can set every weight to zero and use Timex as a plain, honest log of where the hours went, which is still the entire product.

That's the tell that separates the two. Bossware exists to produce a verdict for someone else. A self-tracker exists to hand you a fact and get out of the way. Same columns in the database; opposite purpose; opposite owner.

The price tells you who the customer is

There's a business reason this matters that people miss. Bossware is sold to a buyer who is not the person being tracked — your company pays per seat, forever, and the product's incentive is to give the buyer more visibility into the tracked, not less. The monthly fee and the surveillance point the same direction by design.

Timex is $49, once, for up to three of your own Macs. No subscription, because there's no server to keep running and no one to keep reporting to. The trial is 100 hours of tracking with no signup, no card, no email — and the break timer and lid-down mode stay free forever even after that. I can price it that way precisely because the customer and the tracked person are the same human. There's nobody else in the transaction to sell your day to.

macOS itself is drifting the same direction, for what it's worth. Tahoe added a dedicated permissions panel where you control exactly which apps may even show up in your menu bar, and tighter, more legible controls over what every app can touch. The OS is quietly taking the position that you should be able to see and revoke what software knows about you. Timex is built for that world — it asks for one accessibility permission, the same one it uses to read window titles, and does nothing behind your back with it.

The wave of workplace surveillance isn't slowing down; every number this year says it's accelerating. You can't opt your employer out of it. But you can own the one copy of your day that answers to you — the mirror instead of the glass. That's the whole reason Timex exists.

Download the trial — 100 hours, no account, nothing uploaded. Watch the network while you use it. That's the review I'd trust most.

— DK