I’m on a persistent quest for better productivity and motivation, when it comes to working on things. So I’ve been wondering if anyone has any experience with anything that could track your program usage on windows. In it’s simplest form, something like steam tracking the time a game has been running for. I’ve got Maya LT on Steam and it is quite nice seeing “xx hours in the last two weeks” to have some rough idea of how much I’ve been working in Maya lately. If there would be something to track UE4 editor or half a dozen other programs, I could more easily know when I’ve been slacking and need to work harder.
Ideally I would love something that would create spreadsheets/graphs, monitor which program is active and not just open in the background.
I googled around a bit and after dodging hordes of programs meant for spying on your employees/children and which seemed overly interested in your data and storing it on their servers for “online access”… I found something called Manic Time, which records what your current focus window is and counts afk time automatically as well. Seems to have plenty of options for viewing the data, timeline or just a summary. I’ve only used it for a few days though, so I’m not sure how well it’ll work with longer periods of time, but it does what I need for now with the free version, so I’m pretty happy about that.