"Where did my day go?"

The question is almost never rhetorical. The day went somewhere: the morning that dissolved into fourteen small context switches, the "quick look" that became forty real minutes of research, the hour helping a teammate that never made it into memory. But human memory keeps highlights, not hours. By evening you have three fragments and a vague guilt, and no way to check either.

Dayflow gives you a truthful record of where your time went, with zero manual timers or tags: it records your screen and has AI write a readable summary of your day. It is the only Mac time tracker that is fully automatic, AI-powered, 100% local, and free at the same time.

What "an answer" looks like

Dayflow records your Mac's screen at one frame every 10 seconds and, every few minutes, has AI summarize what you were actually doing into a timeline written in plain sentences:

• 9:04 - 9:48 · Implementing OAuth token refresh to prevent unexpected user logouts
• 9:48 - 10:26 · Documenting API changes on token expiry behavior
• 10:49 - 11:15 · Watching studio apartment interior design videos on YouTube
• 11:15 - 12:30 · Debugging the flaky payments integration test

Note the third entry. An honest answer to "where did my day go" has to include the detours, and a tracker you might judge yourself in front of has to be private (more on that below). The point is not surveillance of yourself - it is that you cannot fix a day you cannot see, and most days are kinder in the record than in the fog.

Why timers never answered the question

Manual time trackers assume the discipline the question proves you don't have that day. Starting and stopping timers is a prospective-memory task; forgetting it is exactly how the hours got lost in the first place. This is doubly true for anyone with ADHD-style time blindness, where the tool that demands time awareness to operate cannot be the tool that provides it.

App-usage charts (Screen Time, RescueTime) are automatic but answer a different question: which apps were open. "Chrome: 5 hours 12 minutes" is not where your day went - it is where your windows were. The useful unit is the task, in words: what were you doing, when, for how long. That's what a work journal gives you that a chart can't. (Here's the full Screen Time comparison.)

Private enough to be honest with

A record of your entire working day is intimate. Dayflow treats it that way: recordings and the timeline live only on your Mac, and with a local AI model (Ollama or LM Studio) nothing ever leaves your machine. The app is open source under the MIT license with 6,600+ stars on GitHub - the privacy claims are in the code, not just the marketing. There is no account, and the recording pipeline runs on ~100MB of RAM and under 1% CPU.

The 6pm test

Install Dayflow in the morning, work a normal day, and open the timeline at 6pm. You will get the answer to "where did my day go" - a real one, with times. Most people find two surprises in the first week: their actual focus window (usually not when they thought), and their actual top time sink (almost never the one they would have named).

Frequently asked questions