Introduction

ActivityWatch is a bundle of software that tracks your computer activity. You are, by default, the sole owner of your data.

It also offers an ecosystem of software to work around it, including ways to collect more data and do different kinds of analysis.

What is ActivityWatch?

• A set of watchers that record relevant information about what you do and what happens on your computer (such as if you are AFK or not, or which window is currently active).

• A way of storing data collected by the watchers.

• A dataformat accommodating most logging needs due to its flexibility.

• An ecosystem of tools to help users extend the software to fit their needs.

Reason for existence

There are plenty of companies offering services which collect Quantified Self data with goals ranging from increasing personal productivity to understanding the people that managers manage (organizational productivity). However, all known services suffer from a significant disadvantage: the user’s data is in the hands of the service providers, which leads to a problem of trust. Every customer of these companies has their data in hands they are forced to trust if they want to use their service.

This is a significant problem, but the true reason that we decided to do something about it was that existing solutions were inadequate. They focused on short-term insight, a goal worthy in itself, but we also want long-term understanding. We created ActivityWatch completely free and open source so anyone can use, improve and extend it.

Data philosophy

Data in its raw form is always the most valuable.

Quantified self data doesn’t take much space by today’s standards, but for services such as RescueTime which have over a thousand customers, every megabyte per user counts.

It’s important that we collect and store data in the highest reasonable resolution so that later we don’t have to “fill the gaps” with lower resolution data with lossy heuristics.

Many services doing collection and analysis of QS data today don’t actually store the raw data but instead store only summaries (such as only storing how long you used an application during a given hour, instead of storing the individual uses). This is a problem with existing services: they store summarized data instead of the raw data.

This is indicative of the fact that they actually lack a long-term plan. They want to provide a certain type of analysis today but aren’t planning for an unknown future with more powerful tools. At ActivityWatch, we expect to want to do some unknown analysis in the future for which we might need the raw data, and so to prepare for that we collect data in as much granularity as we can.

Simply put: It is of importance that we start collecting raw data now, because if we don’t it will be forever lost.