Free ways to track time on a Mac, and what each one costs you

5 October 2026 · 6 min read

You can track time on a Mac without paying for anything. Screen Time is built in, a text file or a calendar costs nothing, Shortcuts can stamp the clock for you, and some trackers have a free tier that does not run out. Free is never quite free, though. Each option charges you in effort, memory or missing detail, and the right one is the one whose cost you will still be paying in week six.

Screen Time: already on your Mac

1. Open System Settings.
2. Choose Screen Time in the sidebar.
3. Open App & Website Activity and turn it on if it is off.
4. At the end of the day, come back and read the list of apps and times.

The effort is close to zero, which is its strength. The costs are elsewhere. Screen Time counts the whole day, so the morning news and the evening’s video are in the same list as the nine to six. Nothing is filed at the end of the day; you have to go and look. There is no export, so keeping a history means copying numbers by hand. And if sharing across devices is on, check that the view is set to this Mac, or your phone’s hours will be mixed in.

How to use Screen Time on a Mac for work goes through it in detail.

A text file or spreadsheet you fill in

The oldest method: a file with one line per block of work. Date, start, stop, what it was.

It is the only free method that knows what you were doing, not just which app you were in, and that is its real value. If you need hours per client or per task, this gives them to you directly.

The cost is you. Every entry is an interruption, and the entries you skip get reconstructed at six in the evening from memory, which is a guess with a timestamp on it. It works well when a day is three or four long blocks. It falls apart on days made of twenty short ones.

One habit helps: log blocks, not tasks. “9:15 to 11:30, proposal” survives. A line for every email does not.

Calendar, filled in after the fact

Make a separate calendar for what really happened, apart from the one that holds your plans.

1. In Calendar, choose File, New Calendar and name it Log.
2. At the end of each day, drag out blocks for what you did.
3. At the end of the week, switch to week view and hide every calendar except Log.

The cost is about five minutes a day and an honest memory. The reward is a picture: you can see the week’s shape, and you can put the planned calendar and the logged one side by side. Time blocking keeps failing? uses that comparison.

A Shortcut that stamps the time

The Shortcuts app can write the timestamp for you, so a log entry is one click and a few words.

1. Open Shortcuts and create a new shortcut.
2. Add Ask for Input with a prompt such as “What are you starting?”
3. Add a Date action set to Current Date, then Format Date to turn it into a readable date and time.
4. Add a Text action that puts the formatted date and your answer on one line.
5. Add Append to Text File and point it at a file such as timelog.txt.
6. In the shortcut’s details, turn on Pin in Menu Bar.

Each run adds a line with the time and what you typed. Action names can shift a little between macOS versions, but the shape holds.

The cost is the same as any start and stop timer: it only knows what you remember to tell it. Miss one switch and the next line is wrong by however long you forgot. You also get timestamps, not durations, so the subtraction is yours to do.

Terminal: the edges of the day

For a day you did not plan to track, the Mac’s power log still has the outline. In Terminal:

pmset -g log | grep "Display is turned on" | tail -10

That lists recent moments the display woke, which is usually enough to see when a day started and when you came back from lunch. It costs nothing, needs no setup, and works backwards over recent days. It tells you when the Mac was awake, not what you did with it. How to see what time you started using your Mac today has the fuller version.

A tracker with a free tier: read what is free

Free tiers differ in what they hold back. Before relying on one, check three things: whether tracking stops after a trial, whether you can export your own data without paying, and whether it needs an account.

Punchcard is specific on all three. Tracking is free and never expires. The CSV export works without a license, and it has one row per session with a start, an end, the app and the seconds. There is no account, and the free version makes no network calls at all. It needs no macOS permissions, because out of the box it records only the name of the app in front.

What is paid is the receipt. At the closing time you set, Punchcard prints a paper receipt of the day: the top five apps with the time on each, the rest as MISC, and a day total. The first two receipts are free. After that, printing needs the license, $9 once for two Macs.

It is not the right free option for everyone. It has no timers, no projects and no clients, so it cannot say which hours were for whom. If that is the number you need, the text log above is the better fit, and the two combine well.

Which one to pick

• Curious for a week: Screen Time. It is already there.
• Need hours per client or task: the text log, or the Shortcut if typing the time is the part you skip.
• Want it automatic, with data you can keep: a tracker whose free tier does not expire and lets you export.
• Need to rebuild yesterday: the power log for the edges, Calendar for the blocks.

Pick the one that asks least of you at the moment you are busiest.

Questions

Is Screen Time accurate enough for a timesheet?

As a rough guide to which apps took the day, yes. As a timesheet, it struggles: it covers every hour the Mac was used, not just work, and it cannot be exported.

Do free time trackers cost something in other ways?

Sometimes. A free service still has to be paid for somehow, so read what it collects and where it keeps it. Reading a privacy policy for a Mac app lists the lines to look for. An app with no account that keeps its data on your Mac has much less to explain.

Can I combine two of these?

Yes, and it is often the best answer. Let something automatic record the hours, and keep a three-line note of what the big blocks were. The record supplies the numbers you would never have written down; the note supplies the meaning no tracker can see.