Free Time Tracker

Whether you’re having loads of work to do before the clock strikes a specific hour, or you’re just hanging around for something to happen, it’s always good to keep an eye on time as it goes by. If your activities mostly have to do with the computer, Free Time Tracker lets you visualize how much you spend with every mouse click.

What adds a great deal of flexibility is portability, since it allows you to track activities right from a USB flash drive, on any computer you need to work on. Another consequence of portability is that system registries don’t need to be modified to ensure functionality, thus keeping the target PC intact.

The application starts tracking your activities as soon as you launch it. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but you might only want to run it when you’re sure you start working, because every activity is recorded, even when staying in the application’s main window.

In fact, the application works by reading the active window, and counting how much time you spend inside it, automatically switching to the new area of focus. Event names add up as they get detected, and even File Explorer is a plausible target. The list shows usage in percentage, splitting it for all items, according to time.

You might want to take the application for a trial run first, just to set up categories. The options menu allows you to thoroughly choose the template and type, as well as idle timeout in seconds. However, categories can also be changed on the spot, in case you’re using a web browser for work, instead of leisure, for example. When done, you can generate a report, which shows up as a pie chart, but export only generates a CSV file.

Free Time Tracker manages to live up to expectations by tracking absolutely everything you do on the computer. Setting up categories and templates takes only a little while, and the real time updating statistics for each active window adds up to accuracy. Although you can’t get your hands on the pie chart report, it’s worth at least a try overall.