---
title: "The Timeline — See Your Entire Day as a Gantt Chart"
description: "xeve now shows your daily app usage as a horizontal timeline. Every app switch, every session, color-coded by category. See your day at a glance and spot patterns in how you work."
date: "2026-03-21"
app: orma
category: "quantified-self"
readingTime: "4 min read"
---

<p>Pie charts and bar graphs summarize your day. The Timeline shows you the raw shape of it. Every app session rendered as a colored bar on a horizontal timeline, hour by hour. It is the closest thing to replaying your workday in fast forward.</p>

<h2>The Gantt View</h2>

<p>The Timeline page renders your app sessions as horizontal bars on a time axis. Each bar is color-coded by category — blue for development, yellow for communication, orange for coding, purple for browsing. The result looks like a Gantt chart of your actual day.</p>

<p>At a glance, you can see structure that summary charts hide:</p>

<ul>
<li><strong>Focus blocks</strong> — long uninterrupted bars of a single color mean deep work</li>
<li><strong>Context switching</strong> — rapid alternation between colors means fragmented attention</li>
<li><strong>Meeting gaps</strong> — empty stretches or communication-colored blocks show when meetings ate your day</li>
<li><strong>Work boundaries</strong> — where your day actually starts and ends vs. when you think it does</li>
</ul>

<h2>Session Merging</h2>

<p>Raw app tracking produces hundreds of micro-sessions per day. Checking Slack for 10 seconds between two VS Code sessions would clutter the timeline. The Timeline view merges consecutive sessions of the same app within a 60-second gap into single blocks, reducing noise while preserving the true shape of your day.</p>

<h2>Stat Cards</h2>

<p>Four metrics sit above the timeline: total tracked screen time, total app switches, your longest uninterrupted session (with the app name), and your most-used app. These give you the quantitative summary while the timeline gives you the qualitative shape.</p>

<h2>Session Detail List</h2>

<p>Below the Gantt chart, a scrollable list shows every merged session with app name, window title, time range, duration, and category indicator. This is your searchable activity log — hover over any timeline bar to jump to the corresponding session in the list.</p>

<p>The Timeline is my most-used dashboard page. Summary stats tell you what happened. The Timeline shows you how it felt. Check yours at <a href="https://orma.xeve.io/dashboard/timeline">xeve.io/dashboard/timeline</a>.</p>