What time did you start last Tuesday?
Your Mac already wrote it down. Every time you unlocked or locked the screen went into the system log — Login Activity Monitor reads it back and turns it into hours, sessions and a timeline. No timers to remember. Nothing to have set up in advance.
Pay what you want — enter 0 and today's activity is yours. Pay $9 or more and every earlier day unlocks. One payment, no subscription, no account.
Total Active Time
67h 27m
Total Sessions
19
Avg Session
3h 33m
Longest Session
4h 33m
Daily Activity
Hours of active screen time per day
Timeline
When the screen was unlocked, hour by hour
The dashboard opens in your browser from the menubar icon. It is served by the app itself, on your own machine.
Not another time tracker
Every other tracker starts collecting the day you install it. This one starts with the data your Mac has already been keeping.
It works backwards
Install it on a Friday and you can still see Monday. macOS logged the lock and unlock events whether or not you were tracking, and the app keeps building on that history the longer it stays installed.
Nothing to remember
No start button, no stop button, no project to pick from a dropdown. You lock your Mac when you step away and unlock it when you come back, which you were doing anyway.
It never phones home
The app reads your local system log and serves a dashboard on localhost. There is no account to create and no server to upload to. The only outbound request it ever makes is checking a license key.
Useful when you forgot to track
Freelancers filling a timesheet on Friday
You billed by the hour all week and logged none of it. The event log gives you the real start and end of each stretch, so the invoice is a reconstruction rather than a guess.
Anyone on a hybrid or flexible schedule
Answers "did I actually do my hours this week?" without installing anything that reports to a manager.
People auditing their own habits
The timeline makes late nights and 11pm sessions obvious in a way a weekly total never does.
Checking who used the Mac and when
Unlock events for a shared or family machine, with timestamps, straight from the system log.
First launch takes a minute
The app is not notarised by Apple yet, so macOS blocks it the first time you open it. That is macOS saying it has not vetted the developer, not that anything is wrong with the app. Worth knowing before you download rather than after.
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1
Move it to Applications
Drag Login Activity Monitor out of the download and into your Applications folder.
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2
Open it once and let it be blocked
Double-click the app and dismiss the warning. This step matters: the button in the next step only appears after macOS has actually blocked it, and only for about an hour afterwards.
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3
Allow it
Go to System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll to the bottom, click Open Anyway and confirm.
No Open Anyway button? Run this once in Terminal instead:
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "/Applications/Login Activity Monitor.app" -
4
Grant Full Disk Access
In System Settings → Privacy & Security → Full Disk Access, switch it on for Login Activity Monitor and restart the app. Without this macOS will not hand over the log entries it reads.
Notarisation is on the list. Until then this is the honest cost of a small independent app, and the source is on GitHub if you would rather read it before you run it.
Try it on today, pay for the rest
The free version shows today's activity in full, so you can see exactly what the app reads off your own Mac before deciding.
Free
$0Enter 0 at checkout. Today's sessions, stats, timeline and event log.
- Today's activity in full
- Menubar app and local dashboard
- Nothing leaves your Mac
- Keeps recording history in the background
Full history
$9+Pay $9 or more on the same page. Every day the app has recorded.
- Everything in the free version
- 7, 14 and 30 day views
- Compare days and spot patterns
- One-time purchase, no subscription
Questions
How far back can it see?
As far back as your Mac still has log data, which in practice is usually a few days to a couple of weeks. From then on the app saves what it has read, so the window keeps growing the longer it is installed. The dashboard tells you how many days it currently holds.
Why does it need Full Disk Access?
macOS will not hand over loginwindow log entries to an app without it. You grant it once in System Settings, under Privacy & Security. The app reads the log and nothing else.
macOS says the app cannot be opened. Is it broken?
No. It is not notarised by Apple yet, so macOS blocks it on first launch. The install steps above clear it in one command. Apple removed the old Control-click and Open shortcut in recent versions, which is why the Terminal command is the quickest route.
Is my activity uploaded anywhere?
No. The dashboard is served from your own machine on localhost and the data sits in a JSON file in your Application Support folder. The only request the app makes to the internet is verifying a license key with Gumroad.
How accurate is it?
It reports when the screen was locked and unlocked, which is a good proxy for being at the Mac but not a perfect one. Watching a long video without touching the keyboard counts as active. Where the log has a gap the app marks an estimated event rather than dropping the session.
Does it track which apps I use?
No. Lock and unlock events only. If you want per-app breakdowns, a conventional tracker will serve you better.
What happens if I stop paying?
Nothing, because there is nothing to stop paying. It is a one-time purchase and the key keeps working.
It is open source. Why buy it?
Because you would rather have a signed app and a key that just works than build it yourself. The source is public so you can see exactly what it reads.
I paid 0 and my key will not unlock the history. Why?
Every checkout gets a license key, including a free one, so the key on its own does not open the older days. Go back to the same page and pay $9 or more, then enter the key from that purchase.
Find out what your Mac already knows
Install it, grant Full Disk Access, and today's hours are on screen in under a minute.