Automate Your Daily Timeline with Dayflow

Ever finish a workday and wonder where the time actually went? You know you were busy, but the details are a blur of Slack messages, browser tabs, and half-finished commits. Manually piecing together a timeline feels like tedious admin work. What if your computer could just… tell you?

That’s the idea behind Dayflow, a neat open-source tool that automatically generates a timeline of your digital day. It quietly observes your activity across applications and websites, then stitches it all into a clean, visual summary you can review. No manual entry required.

What It Does

In short, Dayflow runs in the background on your Mac, tracking which applications and browser tabs (for Chrome and Arc) are in focus. At the end of your session, it processes all that raw activity data and outputs a simple, chronological timeline. This timeline breaks down your day into blocks, showing what you worked on and for how long, giving you a data-backed snapshot of your productivity and focus.

Why It's Cool

The clever part isn't just the tracking—it's the thoughtful, privacy-focused automation. Dayflow isn't a live surveillance dashboard; it's a local-first, post-hoc analysis tool. All data is processed locally on your machine. It only generates the timeline after you're done, which feels less intrusive and more like a personal journaling tool.

For developers, this is particularly useful. You can see how much time you actually spent in your IDE versus debugging in the browser, or how a "quick" research task ballooned into an hour. It’s built with Go for the core engine and a native macOS status bar app, making it lightweight and snappy. The output is a straightforward text-based timeline, easy to parse or potentially script against if you wanted to build your own integrations.

How to Try It

Since Dayflow is a macOS app that requires accessibility permissions to track app focus, the best way to try it is to build and run it from source.

1. Clone the repo:

   git clone https://github.com/JerryZLiu/Dayflow.git
   cd Dayflow
   

2. Build and run the app: The repository contains an Xcode project for the status bar app (DayflowApp) and Go modules for the engine. Open the project in Xcode, build it, and run it. You'll need to grant the necessary permissions when prompted.
3. Use it: Just let it run in your menu bar. When you're ready to see your timeline, quit the app. It will process the data and output a timeline.txt file in the project directory.

Check out the GitHub repository for more detailed build instructions and requirements.

Final Thoughts

Dayflow is a pragmatic tool for the data-curious developer. It’s not about micromanaging every minute, but about gaining occasional, honest insight into your work patterns. I could see this being a great foundation for someone who wants to auto-generate time reports, log project hours, or just become more aware of their deep work versus context-switching ratio. It’s a simple idea, executed well, that solves a real, quiet problem.

Follow for more cool projects: @githubprojects