Say your day out loud and it becomes a checklist. Start a task and the clock sits in your menu bar, out of the way, until you stop.
It’s a Mac app, so it won’t run on a phone or tablet. Open wheredidmytimego.org on your Mac to download it.
Download for MacFree · 58 MB · macOS 11.0 or later · Intel and Apple Silicon
I built this for myself and I use it every day. It’s early, so if you try it, I’d genuinely like to know what breaks.
Open the laptop, tap the icon in your menu bar, and just talk: “I need to write the essay, then revise chapter four, and after that I want to go to the gym.” One button turns that into three things you can tick off. That is the whole morning: open, say it, start.
Talking uses your Mac’s own dictation: press Fn twice and speak. Would rather type? Type the same sentence and it works the same way. Either way the list is made on your own Mac, by plain rules, and your words are never sent anywhere.
Press play on a line and that task starts timing. The clock sits in the menu bar where the battery is, with no Dock icon and nothing covering your work. Click it and a small widget drops down; click away and it tucks itself back. Pause for a break and the time freezes rather than being lost.
Every day you track fills in a calendar built from your own work, not from invitations. Analytics opens with a sentence rather than a wall of charts: how long you focused this week, and whether that’s more or less than last week.
Your Mac can only vouch for apps signed through Apple’s paid developer programme, and this one isn’t signed yet. So the first time you open it, macOS stops you. Getting past it takes about a minute, and the install guide shows every click.
See the five steps ›No account. No server. No sync. No subscription. No AI. Not one network call. Everything you track lives in a single file on your Mac, and deleting the app leaves it exactly where it was.
~/time_tracker.db and two marker files. That is the whole footprint. Back it up by copying that one file.I made Where Did My Time Go on my own, in Ontario, Canada. I kept reaching Friday after a week of being busy every day, with nothing I could point to. Nobody hands me a to-do list, so the planning was on me, and so was the honest accounting at the end of the week. Most weeks, both got skipped.
Every time tracker I tried wanted me to stop working in order to use it. So this one does the opposite: say your day in the morning, press play, and it stays out of the way in the menu bar until you stop. I use it every day for my own work, and I build it in the evenings.
There is no company behind it, no investors and nothing to upsell. It is free because it costs me nothing to give away: the app never connects to a server, so there isn’t one to pay for.
Useful or broken, I’d like to hear either way, and I read everything: [email protected]. You can also follow along as I build it, on LinkedIn.