Application Usage logger

Hi all,

I am looking for a simple productivity tool that would log the time an application is active.

As an example, it would would works as such:

I open a Word Document at 12:21:12. At 12:23:21 I switch over to Mail. Then at 12:28:42 I switch back to Word. At 12:88:32 I call it quits for the day and sleep my mac.

The next day I open a spreadsheet/program or other utility and see a list of how many hours/minutes/seconds I used each program the day before.

I need this because I am spending a lot of my day writing in Celtx but also do a lot of research in Safari and write a lot of messages in mail. It would be brilliant if I could look at a simple list of time spent in each application at the next day and see "aha! I spend 2 hours, 13 minutes in Celtx yesterday, but only 20 minutes in Safari and 12 minutes in Mail. It was a productive day!"

I guess the question is: Is there such a tool?

The closest thing I have found is a tool aptly named Application Usage 1.1 that logs start and quit times of applications.
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/25407

This tool, however, does not note if an application was actually the front most one, ie. if it was actively used, but only if it was open or not.

Any help on the matter would be greatly appreciated.

GGJstudios said:

Just because an app is the active window, doesn't mean it's being used. You could open a spreadsheet and then walk away from the computer for 4 hours. That doesn't mean you actively worked on a spreadsheet for 4 hours. There's no way to know if you're working in an app or not, since you could spend hours reading a document without clicking anything.

Click to expand...

I am of course aware of that. One would have to simply not do that for the method I described to work. Generally that is what I do anyway, since I am still trained from the OS 9-days of only having a document/app open when I actually use it.