Writing
Essays on automatic time tracking, honest comparisons with the rest of the category, and notes from building this thing.
Activity monitors track time by watching every app and window you touch — sometimes your screen. Tracking file changes watches only the folders and URLs you choose. It turns out to be more private, it keeps the per-project context an app log throws away, and it lands as an invoice with no manual cleanup. Here's the difference, point by point.
Hesitant to install an automatic tracker because it sounds invasive? Good instinct. Here is the complete, field-by-field list of what the desktop client and browser extension actually send us — and the two things that never leave your machine: your file contents and your browsing URLs.
Agency time tracking usually forces a bad trade: either you get clean per-project numbers by surveilling everyone with screenshots, or you get privacy and a mess of spreadsheets. You can have the roll-ups without the monitoring. Here's how the org → team → project structure works.
The usual freelance stack is a time tracker plus a separate invoicing tool, joined by a CSV export and a lot of copy-paste. When tracking and invoicing live in one product, a tracked session becomes an invoice line item directly. Here's how that loop works end to end.
Most "dev time trackers" are an editor plugin you have to install, configure, and trust. This one watches the files your editor saves instead — so it works the same in VS Code, Neovim, JetBrains, or a terminal on a VPS, with nothing to install in the editor at all.
Juggling four clients in a single afternoon makes manual timesheets hopeless — you'd spend more time logging than working. Here's how to keep each client's hours separate automatically, so every minute lands on the right project and the right invoice.
Most "automatic" time trackers earn the word by watching your screen — screenshots, keystroke counts, productivity scores. You can track hours accurately without any of that. Here's how capture works when it's based on file edits and URLs instead of surveillance.
If you bill by the hour and keep forgetting to hit start, the problem isn't discipline — it's the timer. Here's how to capture billable hours automatically from the work you're already doing, and turn them into invoices without reconstructing your week from memory.
Running Claude Code on a headless VPS? The desktop app can't help you there. Here's how to install the Temporal.ist Linux CLI, sign in over SSH, and use the TUI to auto-track every billable hour Claude works.
Temporal.ist is automatic time tracking — your file edits and the URLs you visit become billable sessions on their own. No screenshots, no activity scoring, no surveillance. Here's why we built it and how it works.
