Time, kept quietly

I built Dial, a time tracker that lives in the Mac menu bar. I made it because I kept getting to the end of a day and not being able to tell you where it went.

I’d been busy. That’s what I told myself. Busy isn’t really a record though. I’d sit down, do a bunch of things, look up, and the hours had just kind of disappeared. No shape to them. No sense of the time.

Most time trackers exist so you can invoice someone. That’s a reasonable product. I didn’t want that one. I wanted something for the person living the day.

Once you can see the day, you can reevaluate it. I thought I spent Tuesday building. Then I looked: Figma, Claude, Codex, meetings. The building was a sliver. That’s useful. Not as a scolding. Just as a record you can actually read.

The tracker is also a job

The reason I kept dropping other trackers is they asked too much of me. You set them up. You name a bunch of projects before you can even start. You remember to hit start. You remember to hit stop. By Thursday I’d quit.

The loop looked like this: I’d work all morning, forget to track any of it, notice around 4, and then either guess or give up on the day. If the tracker is work, you will not use it. I know because I didn’t.

So I kept cutting. Click a project, you’re tracking. Click another, you’ve switched. A shortcut from anywhere. Nothing to set up first. I didn’t want to spend the day administering the record of the day.

You will forget

This is the part I think most of these tools get wrong. Forgetting isn’t the failure case. It’s the common case. You remember at 4. The morning is gone.

A lot of products solve this by watching you. Screenshots, keystrokes, a silent log running in the background. Sometimes a manager on the other end of it. I didn’t want to build that. Including of myself.

So Dial notices the gaps. A meeting, a call, the stretch where I walked away. It lines them up as proposals. It doesn’t write them down. I look at them and I decide. Nothing goes into the record unless I say so.

that last part is the whole product, really

If I disappear

I also didn’t want the app to need me. If your tracker has to call home to keep working, then I have a leash on your days. I didn’t like that.

There’s no account. Nothing leaves your Mac. If Dial disappeared tomorrow, the days you tracked should still be there, and the app should still open. The tradeoff is I can’t take it back later. I was fine with that.

People talk about time tracking like it’s a productivity system. Dial isn’t that, at least not for me. I don’t open it to become a better worker. I open it so that a few evenings a week I can look at a Tuesday and reevaluate where it actually went. Figma, Claude, Codex, a stack of meetings. The answer is usually not what I would have guessed.

It’s at dial.software if you want to try it. Two weeks, no card.