What is Daylens?
Daylens is a family of apps that captures how you spend your time on desktop and in the browser, then helps you act on it with AI. Everything stays on your device by default. No account required. Fully open source.
Most time trackers tell you "you had Chrome open for 3 hours." Daylens tells you what you were actually doing in Chrome, which sites you visited, how often you switched between tasks, and when your focus blocks happened.
How it works
- Tracks automatically — Daylens runs in your menubar and watches which apps and browser tabs are in focus. No manual timers, no browser extensions needed.
- Groups into work blocks — Raw app switches get grouped into meaningful work sessions. Instead of 200 individual events, you see "worked on the Q3 report from 5 PM to 7 PM."
- AI-powered insights — Ask questions like "What was I working on at 3 PM?" or "What was my biggest distraction this week?" and get answers grounded in your actual activity data.
- Focus sessions — Built-in Pomodoro timer with focus scoring. See how your focus compares across days.
Key features
- 12+ browsers supported natively — Safari, Chrome, Arc, Brave, Edge, Firefox, Zen, Opera, Vivaldi, and more. No extensions needed.
- Daily and weekly reports — AI-generated summaries with evidence tables showing exactly where time went.
- Focus scoring — Measures your daily focus percentage based on actual app-switching patterns.
- Privacy controls — All data stays local. Optional web sync only if you choose to enable it.
- macOS widgets — Quick stats on your lock screen and menu bar.
Surface area
- macOS — Swift-native menubar app with activity capture, focus blocks, and AI chat over your timeline.
- Windows — Tauri-based desktop build with the same local-first philosophy.
- Web — Mobile-first dashboard for reviewing sessions and trends when you are away from the desk.
Tech stack
- macOS: Swift 5.9, SwiftUI, GRDB (SQLite), Accessibility API
- Windows: Tauri, Rust-backed desktop shell
- Web: Next.js, Convex, React, Tailwind
Why I built this
I kept finishing work days feeling like I only got 3 hours of real work done out of 9. But I couldn't tell where the other 6 hours went. Screen Time wasn't helpful. Nothing showed me the real story. So I built Daylens to answer that question for myself, and figured others might want the same thing.
Time is the one resource you cannot replenish. Daylens turns passive logging into something you can query, reason about, and improve — without trading privacy for insight.



