You already have a time tracker. It shipped with your Mac.

Screen Time has been sitting in System Settings this whole time, quietly counting your hours — free, private, and on by default. Before you pay anyone for time tracking, you should know exactly what it does and where it stops. For a lot of people, it's enough. For anyone who works at their Mac, it runs out of road fast.

Short answer: to check Screen Time on your Mac, open System Settings → Screen Time and click App Usage. You get per-app totals and category roll-ups for today and the last seven days. It's free, computed on-device, and good enough for "am I on my phone too much" — but it has no window titles, no export, and no way to correct the record.

What Screen Time does well

It's free and it's already installed. That's not nothing — it's the reason every paid tracker has to justify itself.

It's private in a way most apps aren't. Screen Time computes its reports on your device; there's no dashboard on a server somewhere holding your week.

The categories are useful at a glance. Social, productivity, entertainment, creativity — you see the shape of your usage without any setup.

And the guardrails are real: App Limits, Downtime, and communication restrictions make it the best free tool there is for a kid's Mac, or for putting a hard cap on your own YouTube habit.

Where it stops working

No window titles. This is the big one for anyone who works in a browser or an editor. Screen Time sees "Safari: 4 hours." Was that client research, documentation, or four hours of video? Screen Time can't tell you, because it never recorded what the window was. A day of real work and a day of scrolling can produce identical reports.

Categories are too coarse to act on. "Productivity: 6 hours" sounds great until you drill in and can't. You can't split one app into work-time and waste-time, can't say "github.com is focus, youtube.com is waste," can't recategorize anything. The buckets are fixed and the bucket is the whole answer.

No export. You can look at your week. You can't do anything with it — no CSV, no file, nothing you can open in Numbers or send to an invoice. The data is a screensaver, not a record.

No idle honesty. Walk away from your Mac with a video paused and the browser focused, and Screen Time can keep counting that app as usage. There's no "you were gone for 25 minutes" in the data. A tracker that counts absence as presence teaches you nothing except distrust.

No way to fix the record. The meeting away from your keyboard, the phone call, the notebook hour — Screen Time has no concept of manual entries. The gaps just stay gaps, and your report says you did less work than you did.

What a dedicated screen time app for Mac adds

The gap between "am I using my Mac too much" and "where did my workday go" is exactly where the paid category lives. A real tracker gives you:

  • Window titles and URLs — "Chrome" becomes "3 hours: docs, client portal, YouTube." Same app, three different truths.
  • Rules you write — you decide what counts as focus, not a fixed category list.
  • Export — the week becomes a CSV, and the CSV becomes an invoice.
  • Idle honesty — an idle gate that stops counting when you're gone, and a way to log what you were actually doing.
  • A record you own — a file on your disk you can back up, query, and keep.

I make Timex, which does all of the above — 1 Hz sampling into a single local SQLite file, no account, no cloud. Screen Time's privacy posture was actually the design brief: same "nothing leaves your Mac" stance, with the working-day detail Screen Time deliberately skips.

So which one do you need?

If the question is "how much do I use this Mac, and should my kid have limits" — Screen Time, done, free. You can stop reading here and not spend a cent.

If the question is "where did my Tuesday go and can I bill for it" — you've already found Screen Time's ceiling, because you've already looked at its report and still don't know the answer. That's the moment a dedicated tracker earns its price.

Download Timex and see the difference a window title makes. The trial is 100 hours of real tracking — about two work weeks.

— DK