Dayflow

Dayflow is an open source, local-first work journal and time tracker for macOS. It runs quietly in the background, captures lightweight screen activity, and uses AI to turn what you did into a chronological timeline of activity cards. There are no timers to start and no notes to keep: the journal writes itself.

Because it analyzes what is actually on screen rather than just which app was active, Dayflow produces context-aware summaries. Working in Cursor, Chrome, YouTube, or Slack becomes a meaningful description of the days work, along with a daily standup view, a weekly review with focus patterns and distraction tracking, timeline export to Markdown, and a chat feature that answers questions about your day grounded in the recorded timeline.

Privacy is the core pitch: recordings, timeline data, and the database stay on your Mac, and AI analysis can run entirely locally through Ollama or LM Studio. If you prefer quality over locality, you can use Gemini with your own API key, or ChatGPT and Claude through their local CLI tools. Compared with automatic trackers like RescueTime, Memtime, or Rize, Dayflow is free, open source, macOS-native, and never sends your screen history anywhere unless you choose a cloud AI provider.