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How to get a daily report of app usage on a Mac

· 6 min read

There are three ways to get a daily app usage report on a Mac. Screen Time shows one in System Settings if you go and look. You can make that semi-automatic with a scheduled screenshot. Or you can use an app built around a closing time, which prints the day’s report by itself. Punchcard is the third kind, and the difference between looking for a report and being handed one turns out to be the difference between doing it once and doing it every day.

What a daily app usage report should contain

Before choosing a method, decide what you want on the page. For most people it is:

  • the date
  • each app that was in front, with its time
  • a total for the day
  • something that makes it feel finished

The last item sounds frivolous and is not. A report that arrives as a finished object gets read. A report you have to go and assemble gets skipped on the days that matter most, which are the busy ones.

Method 1: Screen Time, on demand

  1. Open System Settings, then Screen Time.
  2. Turn on App & Website Activity if it is off.
  3. At the end of the day, open App & Website Activity and leave the view on Today.
  4. Read the app list below the chart. Each app has its time for the day.

This is a daily report in the sense that the data is daily. It is not a report in the sense of something delivered: nothing prompts you, nothing is saved, and there is no export. For the limits in detail see Screen Time on a Mac for work.

Method 2: a scheduled screenshot of Screen Time

If you want to keep Screen Time and just want a copy every evening, you can automate the capture with tools already on the Mac.

  1. Open Shortcuts (in Applications).
  2. Create a new shortcut. Add an Open App action and choose System Settings. Add a Wait action of a few seconds so the window is up.
  3. Add a Run Shell Script action containing screencapture ~/Desktop/screentime-$(date +%F).png.
  4. Save the shortcut, then in Calendar create a daily event at your closing time with a custom alert that opens the shortcut (Custom, then Open File, then choose the shortcut).

It works, with caveats. The screenshot shows whatever pane System Settings last had open, so you need it to be on App & Website Activity when it fires. It captures the whole screen, not just the list. And it is a picture, not data. This is a fair amount of plumbing for a result that is still a screenshot, which is why most people who get this far end up on method three.

Method 3: an app that prints the report at closing time

This is what Punchcard does, and it is the whole of what it does.

  1. Download Punchcard and open it. It appears in the menu bar. There is no setup wizard and it asks for zero macOS permissions: no Accessibility, no Screen Recording, no Full Disk Access.
  2. Set a closing time.
  3. During the day it notices which app is in front, recording the app name only. It never sees window titles, document names, URLs, keystrokes or screen contents.
  4. At closing time the report prints as a paper receipt. Paper feeds out of a slot line by line over about two and a half seconds with a soft dot-matrix whirr. The day is itemized by app, one line per app with its time, then a day total, then a stamp that lands last at a slightly different angle each day. A real Code 128 barcode at the bottom encodes the date.
  5. Tear it off by dragging down. Export as a 1080 by 1350 PNG, built for posting, or copy the plain text.

If the Mac was asleep or shut at closing time, the receipt prints late, headed SORRY WE MISSED YOU. A week roll prints on Sundays and a month roll at month end, so the daily report has a weekly and monthly counterpart without any extra work.

Tracking never expires and the first seven receipts are free. After that it is nine dollars once for two Macs, every update included.

Keeping the reports

A daily report is most useful in a stack. A single day tells you it was a heavy browser day; ten days tell you it is always a heavy browser day on Tuesdays.

  • Screen Time keeps Today and This Week in the settings pane and has no export.
  • The screenshot method produces one PNG per day on the Desktop, which you can file into a folder.
  • Punchcard keeps every day in one SQLite file at ~/Library/Application Support/Punchcard/punchcard.sqlite, and exports CSV from the app. The receipts themselves can be exported as PNG or text individually. Burn the roll deletes everything if you want to start over.

Export your time data to CSV and keep it forever is about why the file matters more than the app.

What none of these reports can tell you

A daily app usage report is a report about the Mac’s front window. It is worth saying what that leaves out, so the report is read correctly.

  • Time away from the desk with an app left in front is counted as that app. Lock the screen when you leave if you want clean numbers.
  • A browser is one line. Per-site time requires either Safari with Screen Time, or a tracker that reads window titles via Accessibility permission, which is a larger privacy grant than a report needs.
  • Phone calls, paper, and thinking do not appear.
  • App names are not tasks. “Four hours in the editor” is a fact; what was built in those four hours is yours to remember.

Punchcard in particular does not track per project or per client, has no billable rates, no manual timers, no team features and no iPhone app. It is a report of the day, and it stops there on purpose.

Questions

Can I get the report sent to me by email or to a chat? Not from Screen Time, and not from Punchcard, which has no networking code at all. Punchcard’s export is a PNG or plain text that you can paste wherever you like. How to share a summary of your workday with a remote team covers doing that by hand.

Can the report come at a different time on different days? Punchcard has one closing time and prints at it. Pick the time you usually finish; an occasional early day just means an emptier receipt.

Does it include weekends? Punchcard records whenever it is running, whatever the day. If you would rather not see Saturdays, quit it on Saturdays; the week roll on Sunday includes whatever was recorded.

Is a screenshot of Screen Time good enough? For an occasional check, yes. For a daily record, a picture of a settings pane is hard to compare across days and impossible to add up. If you find yourself wanting totals across a week, that is the moment to switch to something that writes a file.