Open your phone's screen time report and you will see a number that feels roughly true and is almost entirely useless. Six hours. Six hours of what?
The problem is that most tracking counts the wrong thing.
Open is not the same as watching
A tab sitting in the background is not attention. Neither is a laptop left open while you make dinner, or a video playing to an empty room.
If a tracker counts any of those, its totals are inflated in a way you cannot correct for, because you cannot tell which minutes were real. A number you cannot trust is worse than no number, because you will still act on it.
Useful tracking counts one thing: the tab you are actually looking at, while you are actually there. That means the active tab, in the focused window, while the machine reports someone present.
The three things a tracker has to get right
- Active tab only. Not every open tab. Not background audio.
- Focused window only. Alt-tab to another app and the clock stops.
- Idle detection. Step away and it pauses, resuming when you come back.
Miss any one of those and the totals drift upward until they are decorative.
Frequency beats duration
Even a correct total hides the thing you most want to know.
Forty minutes on a news site as one sitting is reading. Forty minutes as thirty separate visits is a compulsion loop, and it costs far more than the forty minutes suggests — every switch carries a re-focus cost that never shows up in a duration.
If you are trying to change a habit, how often you go somewhere is the more actionable number, and almost nothing reports it.
Why local matters here
Screen time data is a minute-by-minute record of your attention. It is one of the more revealing datasets about a person that exists, and it is routinely uploaded to a server so it can be shown back to you in a nicer chart.
There is no technical reason for that. The measurement happens on your machine, the storage costs nothing, and the analysis is arithmetic. A tracker that sends it anywhere has made a product decision, not an engineering one.
What we built
Tallied counts only the active tab in the focused window, pauses after 60 seconds of idle, and keeps 30 days of history in your browser. No account, no server, no network requests at all.
It is free, and the data never leaves the machine it was measured on.