What ulogme Does

ulogme answers a simple question: where did your time go today? It's a personal tracking tool that automatically monitors what you're doing on your computer throughout the day, then shows you a beautiful timeline visualization of your activity. Instead of manually logging your work, the software runs silently in the background, recording which windows you had open and how much you were typing at any given moment. Later, you can see a detailed breakdown of your day—how much time you spent in your editor versus your browser, when you were most active, and where your hours actually went.

How It Works

The project has two parts: a data collector and a visualizer. On the data collection side, ulogme runs two small scripts that record your active window title (the name of whatever application you're currently using) and the frequency of your keystrokes, storing this information in simple log files on your computer. None of this data ever leaves your machine—it all stays completely local. Once the data is collected, a web server displays everything in your browser as an interactive timeline. You can see your activity broken down by hour, click on specific windows to toggle them on and off in the visualization, and add custom notes to annotate important events (like "had a meeting" or "coffee break"). The interface is built with d3js, a popular visualization library, which creates beautiful interactive charts from your activity logs.

Who Would Use This

This is built for anyone curious about their own productivity patterns—whether that's a developer wanting to understand how their coding time breaks down, a founder tracking where their day actually goes, or anyone who wants concrete data on their computer habits. It's particularly useful if you work across many different applications and want to see the big picture. For example, you might discover you spend more time in Slack than you realized, or that your most productive coding hours are between 9 and 11 AM. The annotation feature lets you correlate activity patterns with real-world events, so you could later analyze how your productivity changes on days when you exercise, sleep less, or attend lots of meetings.

Notable Tradeoffs

The tool only works on Ubuntu and macOS—Windows users are out of luck. On the technical side, the visualization uses modern browser features that not all older browsers support, so Chrome works better than Firefox. The README also notes that the OSX version requires recompiling if you want to modify the data collection part, which makes it less hackable than the Ubuntu version, though the web interface itself is easy to customize for anyone comfortable editing JavaScript.