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How to use Screen Time on a Mac for work, and where it falls short

· 6 min read

Screen Time on a Mac will tell you how long each app was in front today, and it costs nothing and installs nothing. Turn on App & Website Activity in System Settings, check it at the end of the day, and you have a rough answer to where the hours went. It falls short as a work record in four specific ways: it mixes work with everything else, keeps no end-of-day summary, has no export, and lumps browsers together unless you use Safari.

Turning it on

  1. Open System Settings (Apple menu, then System Settings).
  2. Choose Screen Time in the sidebar.
  3. Click App & Website Activity and turn it on.
  4. Optionally, turn on Share Across Devices if you want your iPhone and iPad counted together with the Mac. For a work record you will usually want this off, so the Mac’s numbers stay the Mac’s numbers.

It starts counting from that moment. There is no history before you switched it on.

Reading it at the end of a workday

  1. Go back to System Settings, Screen Time, App & Website Activity.
  2. Leave the view on Today. The bar chart at the top shows usage by hour. Tall bars are when you were at the desk; gaps are lunch and meetings away from the Mac.
  3. Below the chart is the list of apps with time per app. If it is showing categories (Productivity & Finance, Social, and so on), switch it to apps, which is the useful view for work.
  4. Note the top five apps and their totals. That is the day.
  5. Switch to This Week to see the same list across seven days.

For a first look at a workday this is genuinely revealing, mostly because nobody’s guess matches it. If you have never done it, read why your estimate of your own workday is wrong first and write down your guess before you look.

Where it falls short: everything is mixed in

Screen Time was designed to help people use their devices less. It has no concept of a working day. The seven in the morning news reading is in the same list as the nine to six, and the evening’s streaming is added on top. The Today total is a total for the Mac, not for work.

You can work around it by reading the hourly chart and mentally subtracting, but that means doing arithmetic every evening, and it fails on any day where work and personal use overlap.

Where it falls short: nothing to keep, and no export

The second gap is that Screen Time is a live view, not a record. There is no end-of-day moment, no summary that gets filed, no artifact you can look back at in March and say “that was a heavy week.” The numbers are in a settings pane, and they roll off. If you want to compare this month with last month you are writing things down by hand.

This is the specific gap Punchcard was built to fill. It watches the same signal Screen Time watches, the frontmost app by name only, and asks for zero macOS permissions to do it. The difference is what happens at the end: at the closing time you set, it prints a receipt of the day, itemized by app with time per line, a day total, and a stamp. You tear it off, and it is kept. A week roll prints on Sundays and a month roll at month end. The first seven receipts are free and tracking never expires; after that it is nine dollars once for two Macs.

Punchcard does not see anything Screen Time cannot see. It sees less, if anything, since it ignores websites entirely. What it adds is the closing time and the receipt.

Screen Time also has no export. There is no CSV, no share button on the app list, nothing you can paste into a spreadsheet. A screenshot of the pane is the best you can do, and that is what most people end up doing. If you want your time data to outlive the Mac, it has to come from somewhere that writes a file. Punchcard writes one SQLite file at ~/Library/Application Support/Punchcard/punchcard.sqlite and exports CSV from the app; export your time data to CSV covers why that is worth doing even if you never open the file.

Where it falls short: browsers

Screen Time can break Safari time down by website. For any other browser it shows a single line: the browser’s name and a total. If most of your work happens in a browser that is not Safari, the most important line of the day is also the least informative.

To be fair, this is also true of any app-level tracker, Punchcard included. A browser is one app. The honest position is that per-site time requires either Safari plus Screen Time, or a tracker that reads window titles through Accessibility permission, which is a different privacy trade described in automatic time tracking on a Mac. In practice the single line is less of a problem than it looks, because you usually know what the browser was for.

A reasonable way to use Screen Time for work

Screen Time is worth turning on regardless. It is free, it is already there, and it is the fastest way to check one question on one day. Use it like this:

  1. Turn on App & Website Activity and leave Share Across Devices off.
  2. Once a week, on the same day, open This Week and glance at the top five apps.
  3. When something looks wrong (a browser total that surprises you, an afternoon with no bars), that is the thing to look into.

If you find yourself opening it every evening and wishing it would just hand you the day, you have outgrown it, and that is the point at which a tracker with a closing time earns its place. Screen Time versus a dedicated tracker lays the two side by side.

Questions

Does Screen Time need any permissions? No. It is part of macOS and is switched on in System Settings. It can see more than a third-party app can, including per-site time in Safari, because it is the system.

Can I see more than a week back? The view offers Today and This Week. There is no long history view and no export, so anything older has to have been written down.

Why do Screen Time numbers sometimes disagree with another tracker? They measure slightly different things, and Screen Time may include iPhone and iPad if sharing is on. A frontmost-app tracker counts only the app in front on the Mac. Differences of a few minutes per app are normal; differences of hours usually mean Share Across Devices is on.

Is there a way to get a daily summary out of Screen Time? Not built in. You can take a screenshot at the end of the day and file it. If you want the summary to arrive by itself, you need an app with a closing time; see how to get a daily report of app usage.