If you have ever tried manual time tracking, you know the pattern. Day one: you diligently log every task. Day two: you forget a few entries. Day three: you give up entirely. Manual tracking introduces friction, and friction kills consistency.
The fundamental problem is that humans are terrible at estimating how they spend their time. Studies show we overestimate productive work by 30-40% and completely forget about context-switching overhead. The only solution is automation.
How Automatic Tracking Works
xeve runs as a native macOS menu bar app built in Swift. It uses the NSWorkspace notification center to detect every app switch in real time. When you move from VS Code to Slack to Chrome and back, xeve captures each transition with millisecond precision.
But app-level tracking alone is not enough. Knowing you spent 3 hours in Chrome tells you nothing useful. That is why xeve also captures window titles. Window titles reveal what you were actually doing — which GitHub PR you were reviewing, which Notion doc you were writing, which YouTube video you were watching.
Window Title Parsing
For browsers, window titles contain the page title and URL. xeve parses these to extract the domain, so your Chrome time is broken down by website: github.com, stackoverflow.com, twitter.com, and so on. This turns a generic "browser" category into actionable data.
The tracker also handles edge cases that simpler tools miss:
- Full-screen apps that suppress normal window events
- Idle detection — if you walk away, tracking pauses automatically
- Multiple displays with different active windows
- System apps like Finder and Spotlight that you use briefly but frequently
Automatic Categorization
Every app is automatically categorized into groups: Development, Communication, Browsing, Design, Entertainment, and more. You can customize these categories, but the defaults are solid for most developers.
Each category gets a productivity score from 0 to 100. VS Code and Terminal score high. Twitter and YouTube score low. The scores are configurable — maybe Twitter is research for you, not distraction.
What You Actually See
The web dashboard shows your app usage as a timeline, a category breakdown, and a daily productivity score. You can see patterns immediately:
- How much of your day is deep work vs. communication vs. browsing
- What time of day you are most productive
- How often you context-switch (and what triggers it)
- Weekly trends — are you trending toward more or less focused work
Zero Configuration
The entire setup is: download the app, sign in, and forget about it. There is no manual tagging, no project assignment, no timers to start and stop. The app sits in your menu bar, uses minimal CPU, and syncs to your dashboard in real time.
This is the key difference between xeve and manual tools like Toggl or Clockify. Those tools require discipline. xeve requires none. You get perfect data with zero effort.
Privacy by Design
All tracking data is yours. It syncs to your private Supabase database with row-level security — only you can query your data. You can export everything as CSV or JSON, and you can delete your account and all data at any time.
Window titles can contain sensitive information, so xeve never sends raw titles to any third party. The AI insights feature uses anonymized, aggregated data only.
Get Started
Download the macOS app from xeve.io/download/mac and start tracking automatically. You will have actionable data within a day — no configuration required.