See where your week actually goes

Yes, and it is the app asking rather than the tracker. Point the Claude app at a folder on your computer and it stops with "Git is required for local sessions" until Git is installed. Nothing in the tracker itself uses it, and there is no account to make anywhere.

On a Mac the shortest route is one line in Terminal: xcode-select --install. That installs Apple's own Command Line Tools, which bring Git and Python 3, so it clears this and the Python step together. On Windows, download it from git-scm.com.

Then quit the Claude app completely and open it again, or the same message keeps appearing. You do not need Homebrew for any of this, whatever a search result tells you.

Git keeps a history of every version of a project on your computer, so you can go back to how something was last Tuesday. GitHub is a website that stores those histories online, so a team can share one project, or so a copy exists somewhere other than your laptop. Some people also publish their websites from it.

Genuinely useful once you are building more, free, and completely unrelated to the tracker.

Yes, accept it. It is free, it comes from Apple, it takes a few minutes, and it happens once. It brings Python 3, which the tracker needs, and Git, which the Claude app sometimes asks for.

Restart the thing you installed it for. Quit Terminal completely and open it again. Quit the Claude app completely and open it again.

Anything you install only exists for programs that started up after it, so a window that was already open will never see it. This one catches almost everybody, and it looks exactly like a failed install.

To check it worked, type git --version or python3 --version in Terminal. A version number means you are fine.

That is your Mac login password, the one you use to unlock the computer. Terminal hides it completely while you type, not even dots. Type it blind and press Enter. It went in.

Press Cmd+Space, type "Terminal", press Enter. On Windows the equivalent is Command Prompt: press the Windows key, type "cmd", Enter.

Terminal is just a plain text window for talking to your computer. It has nothing to do with Claude by itself, it is one of the places Claude can live.

Same Claude in all of them. The app is friendlier to look at, and most people starting out use that.

The terminal is the plain text window, and it changes less: when Anthropic redesigns the app, the terminal stays exactly as it was. That is why Maaria works there. It looks intimidating for about a week and then it does not.

The browser version wants a repository online, so it is the one to skip for this. Start wherever you are comfortable, and switch whenever you like. It is the same Claude either way.

Untested, honestly. It may well work, and nobody here can help you when it does not.

The tracker is built for Claude Code, and the line showing how much of your work actually needed you is read from Claude Code's own session records, so that half will not exist anywhere else.

Delete it, download it again from activitywatch.net, open the new one. Nothing else to do.

Either. Always allow means far less clicking. Allow once means you see every single thing before it happens.

While you are learning, the clicks are worth it. Each prompt is Claude telling you it is about to touch your computer, and reading a few of them teaches you more about your own machine than any guide will.

Wait 20 minutes and reload the page, because the tracker logs on a 20 minute heartbeat and a fresh install genuinely has nothing in it yet.

If it is still empty after a tick has passed, the most common reason is that the schedule in step 8 never ran. Installing ActivityWatch makes it watch, and loading the schedule is what moves what it saw into your dashboard. Without that one step the page sits at zero forever while everything behind it works perfectly, which looks exactly like a broken install. Say to Claude: "is the 20 minute schedule actually running?"

Once it has run even once, the dashboard tells you itself. Look top right: it prints when the automatic data was last written, and says so plainly if nothing has arrived in the last 40 minutes. Before that first run there is nothing to print, which is why a half-finished setup looks so much like a working one.

The other two causes are the folder having been moved after setup, and ActivityWatch not actually running.

You moved the folder after setting it up. Point Claude at the new location, then tell it the folder moved so it can update the paths it saved earlier. Say it plainly: "I moved this folder, please update the paths."

Hard refresh: Cmd+Shift+R on a Mac, Ctrl+Shift+R on Windows. A normal reload hands you the old page back out of memory.

If it still looks the same, close the tab completely and ask Claude to open it again. That fixes it the rest of the time.

Ask Claude: "open the dashboard in my browser."

Opening it in your own browser rather than in a panel inside the app is worth doing anyway. Then it lives in a tab next to everything else, and you can glance at it without going anywhere.

Tell it which one you mean: "I mean the time tracker dashboard in this folder."

Claude can see whatever folder you point it at, so during setup keep it pointed at the tracker folder and nothing wider. Smaller folder, fewer surprises. This is also the reason to keep the folder tidy: whatever is in there, Claude can read.

Say "we are not done, let's carry on." It wraps up early sometimes, especially after a long stretch of steps. It picks straight back up where it stopped.

Look at the top of your screen for its icon in the menu bar, near the clock. If the icon is there, it is running. On Windows it sits in the system tray.

You can also just ask Claude to check that everything is recording, and it will look for you.

Expected, and not a fault. Everyone's computer is set up slightly differently, and Claude makes slightly different choices in each install, so no two of these end up identical even from the same download.

What you downloaded is a starting point that becomes yours, rather than a finished product that arrives the same for everyone. Screenshot whatever looks wrong and hand it to Claude.

An ActivityWatch restart dropped the input module, which happens after a reboot or an update. Tick it back on (menu bar icon, Modules, aw-watcher-input) and ask Claude to run the make-it-stick command again.

Your hours and your away detection were never affected. Only the scrolling detail has the hole.

As many as you want. Twenty, a hundred, every website separately if that is useful to you. Tell Claude what you want tracked and it adds it.

Ask your Claude. If you already work with it, it knows your business: "based on what you know about my work, what should I be tracking?"

Take its suggestions, cut the ones that are wrong, keep the rest. That is a better starting list than anything a stranger could write for you.

It guesses from the app at first, and you correct it out loud: "always log LinkedIn as sales, not marketing." It sorts it that way from then on.

Watch it for the first few days and correct anything that lands in the wrong place. Those definitions are genuinely yours, and the tracker only knows them once you say them.

Flip it. Tell Claude to treat your number as a goal to reach rather than a ceiling to stay under. Same logic, opposite direction, and the dashboard fills up instead of burning down.

Yes. "Remove the four languages block, I do not want it." Same for the manual logging box, the goals, or anything else on the page. It is your dashboard, and nothing on it is fixed.

No. It sees that Google Meet was the app in front, and that is all it sees. It never listens, never reads a page, never takes a picture of your screen, and never records a word you typed.

Yes, and most people do it within the first hour. Give Claude your brand colours and ask. It is your page, sitting on your computer, so there is nothing to break.

You do not have to. Once it is installed it keeps logging every 20 minutes until you delete it, whether or not you ever look.

The looking is the only habit. Keep the dashboard open in a browser tab, or bookmark it and click it with your morning coffee. If a bookmark ever opens empty, ask Claude to open it for you.

Yes, with the optional cloud sync included in the folder, which puts your hours in a database you own. Skip it and everything stays in one plain file on this machine, which is the default and what most people want.

Ask it to go through your past Claude transcripts and tell you what your working habits have actually been. Maaria ran this on her own history and found things about how she works that she had no idea about.

You can also backfill the chart from an earlier month, so the tracker starts with history instead of an empty week.