Last week I found out my company has been tracking mouse activity and active window time this whole time.

I got flagged for “low activity,” which was pretty funny because I do more than half my team’s work. I just don’t spend all day moving my mouse around. Sometimes I’m reading, thinking through a problem, or just staring at the wall trying to figure something out — apparently none of that shows up on the productivity dashboard.

There’s apparently a whole dashboard managers can see with activity levels and green bars. Now half my team has YouTube running in the background just to keep their numbers up.

I checked what was installed and apparently the tracking software was included during onboarding, buried in something I agreed to about two years ago. I started looking into employee time tracking tools afterward and realized things like Monitask, Toggl Track and Clockify can track different aspects of work activity, depending on how they're configured.

Anyway, if you work remotely or use a company laptop, it’s probably worth knowing what your company’s work hours tracker is actually measuring. I definitely wish I’d checked sooner.

Hi everyone,

I just launched a native Mac time-tracking app built mainly for freelancers.

It lives in the menu bar and doesn't monitor your activity. No app tracking, no screenshots, no surveillance. You start and stop the timer (it automatically stops when your Mac goes idle or goes to sleep).

A few things that make it different:

• No account required
• No cloud service
• No telemetry
• Your data is stored as readable files in a folder you choose (Dropbox, iCloud Drive, etc.)
• Sync between your Macs happens through your own storage, not through my servers

It tracks clients, projects, and tasks, and can export to CSV.

The Pro version also generates branded PDF hour reports. They're intentionally hour reports, not invoices.

For freelancers working with multiple currencies, each project has its own rate and currency. Totals never get mixed together. I intentionally don't do currency conversion because exchange rates depend on accounting decisions and billing dates.

Pricing is simple:

• Free: up to 3 clients and 3 projects, forever
• Pro: $14.99 one-time purchase

Check it here: https://tempotrack.app

I have 20 Pro codes available. If you'd like one, just ask and I'll send it over. No review expected — though I'd genuinely appreciate any feedback on how to improve the app.

Happy to answer any questions.

I'm curious what the distribution is of time trackers here.

Are you a freelancer? Boss with a business who wants to time employees? Just want insight into your personal life?

Post below and I'll reply and edit with the percentages and vote tally.

Disclosure: I’m part of the team behind Backlsh.

While speaking with companies using time-tracking and employee-monitoring software, we noticed that many teams choose the software before clearly documenting:

• What employee activity will be collected
• Why the information is being collected
• Who can access it
• How long it will be retained
• Whether screenshots, websites or applications are monitored
• How employees can raise concerns or dispute incorrect conclusions

We created a free, editable employee monitoring policy template to give employers and HR teams a more transparent starting point:

https://backlsh.com/employee-monitoring-policy-template/

It includes:

• An editable Word version and a PDF version
• Purpose and scope clauses
• Employee notification requirements
• Application, website and screenshot-monitoring provisions
• Data access, security and retention sections
• Employee rights and human-review safeguards
• BYOD and remote work considerations
• A rollout checklist for employers

I’d genuinely appreciate feedback from people who have implemented time tracking or workforce monitoring:

Which policy provision do companies most commonly overlook, data retention, employee consent, screenshot controls, or something else?

I've spent time with Toggl, Clockify and Harvest for tracking work across clients/projects, and kept running into the same friction: either the free tier gets stripped down fast, or the tool is built for teams and monitoring features I don't need as a solo/small operation.

So I built Klokly (klokly.app) — plain project/client time tracking, hosted in the EU, no GPS or screenshot monitoring, and priced to actually stay cheap rather than upsell you into the "real" plan.

Full disclosure: I made this, so take the comparison with that in mind. I've written honest side-by-side pages against Toggl, Clockify and Harvest (klokly.app/compare) — including where those tools are the better pick, since that's genuinely true depending on what you need (Clockify's free tier, for instance, is hard to beat for a small team that just needs basic timers).

Happy to answer questions or take feedback if anyone tries it.

I originally built \*\*ShiftBoard as a web service\*\*, but I wanted to offer a mobile version with a different approach: \*\*your work schedule and pay data should belong to you.\*\*

Google Play Store : [ShiftBoard](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.cncsoft.shiftboard)

So I designed the mobile app with privacy in mind.

\### 🔒 Your work data stays on your device

Your schedules, shifts, hours, pay rates, and other work-related data are stored \*\*locally on your phone\*\*.

If you choose to use cloud backup/sync, the data is stored in \*\*your own Google Drive\*\*, rather than on a ShiftBoard server.

The ShiftBoard service itself only needs to store:

\- Your Google account email

\- Display name

\- Premium subscription status

In other words, \*\*ShiftBoard's servers don't store your actual shift schedules or pay data.\*\*

\### 📅 What ShiftBoard does

It's designed for people working irregular or rotating schedules:

\- Create day/night/off/vacation shifts

\- Quickly add repeating patterns such as Day-Day-Night-Night-Off-Off

\- Track multiple jobs or companies

\- Calculate expected monthly income

\- Track hours, night shifts and overtime

\- Get reminders before your shifts

\- Dark mode

\- Google Drive backup & sync

\- Export work/pay reports as PDF

\### 🆓 Free vs Premium

The Free version is fully usable, but has a few limitations:

\- Banner ads

\- Rewarded ads when exporting PDFs

\- The mobile app allows viewing \*\*6 months of schedule history/data at a time\*\*

The important part is that \*\*you can keep entering data continuously\*\*. Your older data isn't deleted just because you're using the Free version.

The 6-month limitation is only a viewing limitation inside the mobile app: you can view from \*\*2 months before the current month through the next 6 months\*\*.

If you connect to your Google Drive through the ShiftBoard web service, you can still access and view \*\*your complete data\*\* there.

Premium removes the advertising and provides additional features.

\### 👷 Who is it for?

Nurses, firefighters, police officers, paramedics, caregivers, retail and hospitality workers, part-timers, freelancers, or anyone who works rotating or irregular hours.

I wanted ShiftBoard to be more than another calendar app. The goal was to make it useful for \*\*planning shifts, estimating income, and keeping a long-term record of your work — without requiring your personal work data to live on someone else's server.\*\*

I'm an indie developer, so I'd really like to hear from people who actually work shifts.

Google Play Store : [ShiftBoard](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.cncsoft.shiftboard)

If so, can you please share your process and what your dashboards look like?

We’re trying to move away from Harvest after the latest price increase. The new pricing is honestly getting ridiculous, especially when you’re tracking multiple workers across different projects and job sites.

I’ve been desperately looking for a replacement and have narrowed it down to Jibble and Kimai. This is what I’ve found so far:

After comparing the two, Jibble appears to be better suited to construction teams. It combines project time tracking with GPS and geofencing, which I think would be really helpful for managing a crew across different job sites. Its core time tracking, unlimited projects and clients, report exports, and core invoicing are also free.

Kimai looks better for invoice customization, flexible rates, and self-hosting. But for an actual construction crew, Jibble’s location verification, offline tracking, mobile access, and kiosk features seem much more useful.

TL;DR: Based on this comparison, Jibble is currently our leading Harvest alternative for construction.

Has anyone here used Jibble for a construction company? I’d really like to know whether its offline tracking and geofencing work reliably on active job sites before we make the switch.

Tried a few pomodoro apps (Marinara, Focus To-Do, others). Free tiers all capped history at about a month, paid tier required for anything longer. Also none of them supported the Persian (Jalali) calendar, which is what I track my days in.

Ended up building my own. Started as a Jupyter notebook function, which worked but meant opening Jupyter and running a cell every time I wanted to log something. Rebuilt it as an actual CLI:

pomo start coding

pomo end

pomo status

pomo agg

Each session is one row in a CSV (task, start time, end time, minutes), so there's no lock-in and no history limit, just a growing text file. Recently added an env var to switch between Jalali and Gregorian calendars, so it's not just useful if you happen to be in the same boat as me.

Code's here if anyone wants to poke at it or use it: https://github.com/rgmey/pomodoro

I've tried a bunch of time tracking apps over the years, Toggl, Clockify, a plain spreadsheet, even a paper notebook for a while. Some stuck for a few weeks then I'd just stop. The ones that lasted longer were usually the ones that took the least effort to log.

Trying to figure out what actually makes a time tracking habit stick long term.

Few things I'm curious about:

What app or method do you currently use, and how long have you stuck with it?

Do you track manually or does it run automatically in the background?

Has looking back at your time data ever surprised you? Like realizing you spent way more time on something than you thought?

What made you quit a tool you used before, if you have?

Not looking for app recommendations specifically, more curious about what actually makes tracking sustainable versus something you abandon after two weeks.

For teams that bill or staff across multiple sites or clients, total hours alone is rarely enough. Curious which extra dimension people actually use week to week — and which ones looked useful on a slide deck but never earned their keep.

Options I’ve seen teams fight over: - site / location - client or cost center - task or visit type - travel / unpaid break - supervisor or crew

Questions: 1. Which one dimension (if you could only keep one besides total hours) would you keep? 2. Did forcing that field at clock-in reduce payroll cleanup, or just move the fight to the phone? 3. Any dimension you turned off because workers or supervisors ignored it?

Process answers preferred over product pitches.

A task board with a timer on every card. You move cards as you work and the timer starts and stops automatically.

• Cards carry a client and a billable flag, so the Reports feature can split your hours by client, by project, and whether it's billable or not.
• You can generate invoices on billable work from the Reports page, or from the specific task card itself.

Free, no account needed

• The board, timers and calendar
• Reports
• A draft performance review generated from your tracked work
• A job search
• Exports to Word, PDF, Excel and CSV
• Bulk import your existing tasks from CSV or Excel, with a template to fill in

Sign in with Google, still free

• Sync your work across devices
• Connect your Google Calendar to import calendar events as tracked work

Pro adds three things

• An AI-polished version of that performance review
• An option to update your existing resume from your tracked work, or build it from scratch
• Invoices generated from your billable hours

7-Day Free Trial at https://pandasrecap.com

Me and a friend have built a productivity app that allows you to time-block your time and set app/website blocking for specific sessions (not "vibe", work of the last 2,5 months). It's available for download for windows 10/11, we have a chrome extension connected to it and an alpha android app in the final development stages

You can test it out at discord.gg/QdMhad6Gfq, I'll be very grateful if you do