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Find out where your screen time actually goes.

ActivityWatch Projects turns your ActivityWatch history into a clear picture of time per project: no timers to start, and no tagging or rules to enter for every activity, day after day!

Getting started

You need ActivityWatch running with its window and AFK watchers. For website rules, also install the ActivityWatch browser extension.

1. Install. Pick your system:

   Windows (PowerShell)

   irm https://github.com/mr-asa/activitywatch-projects/releases/latest/download/install.ps1 | iex

   Installs into %LOCALAPPDATA%/ActivityWatchProjects.

   Linux

   curl -fsSL https://github.com/mr-asa/activitywatch-projects/releases/latest/download/install.sh | sh

   Installs into ~/.local/share/activitywatch-projects (needs curl or wget, and unzip).

   macOS

   The same command as on Linux. It installs into ~/Library/Application Support/ActivityWatchProjects. The one-click Update button is not available there: run the command again to update.

   By hand (any system)

   Download activitywatch-projects.zip from the releases, unpack the app folder anywhere and add projects = "<that folder>" to the [server.custom_static] section of aw-server.toml.

   The script downloads the latest release and adds one line to ActivityWatch's aw-server.toml (a backup is made first).

2. Restart ActivityWatch once and open http://127.0.0.1:5600/pages/projects/.

3. Click + Add project, give it a name and a rule, and your history starts filling in.

Updates. The dashboard checks GitHub for a new release once a day and shows a banner with an Update button; one click installs it and reloads the page (Windows and Linux). If the button does nothing, run the install command again. The check can be switched off by setting updateCheck to false in the browser's local storage entry activitywatch-projects.view.

Tested with ActivityWatch 0.14 on Windows. The Linux and macOS installer has been checked only against a local package, not on a real machine.

Speed

Open ActivityWatch at http://127.0.0.1:5600 rather than localhost:5600. On Windows, localhost tries IPv6 first while ActivityWatch listens only on IPv4, so every request loses about 200 ms. For a dashboard that makes several requests in a row, that adds up to seconds: the first report load drops from about 3.3 s to 0.3 s. The rest of the ActivityWatch interface gets faster too.

The browser keeps view preferences (chart range, filters, export options) and the chart cache separately for each address, so they start empty on the new one. Projects, rules and presets are stored in ActivityWatch and don't depend on the address.

For developers

Architecture, data model, tests and deployment are described in AGENTS.md.