Skip to main content

Time Guardian Hourglass Time Guardian

Protect your time!

CI Status PyPI Version License

Ever wonder how you really spent your day? Time Guardian silently captures screenshots and uses AI to tell you exactly what you were doing—so you can finally answer the question: "Where did my afternoon go?"

Why Time Guardian?

📸 Automatic tracking — Set it and forget it. Screenshots every 5 seconds, intelligently filtered.
🧠 AI-powered analysis — AI Vision understands what you're doing, not just which app is open.
📊 Honest reports — See breakdowns by app, activity type, and get AI-generated summaries.
🔒 Privacy-first — Everything runs locally. Your screenshots and data stay on your machine.

Installation

pip install time-guard

Quick Start

# Start tracking (runs until you stop it)
time-guardian track

# Generate a report of your activity
time-guardian summary

That's it. Time Guardian will capture screenshots, analyze them with AI, and show you where your time went.

Usage

Tracking

# Track indefinitely (Ctrl+C to stop)
time-guardian track

# Track for 1 hour
time-guardian track --duration 60

# Custom interval (every 10 seconds instead of 5)
time-guardian track --duration 60 --interval 10

# Track without AI analysis (just screenshots)
time-guardian track --no-ai

Screenshots are saved to ~/.time-guardian/screenshots by default.

Reports & Analysis

# View activity summary
time-guardian summary

# Analyze a specific screenshot directory
time-guardian analyze-screenshots -s ./my-screenshots

# Check version
time-guardian version

Utility Commands

# Verify screen recording permissions work
time-guardian check-permissions

# Take a single screenshot
time-guardian screenshot -o snapshot.png

# See connected monitors
time-guardian monitors

# List visible windows
time-guardian windows

# List running processes
time-guardian processes

Example Report

Time Guardian Activity Report
=============================
Generated at: 2025-12-04T05:26:42

Activity by Application
-----------------------
[Cursor] - 7 events
  • Coding
  • Code editing and running a script
  ...

[iTerm2] - 4 events
  • Coding
  ...

AI Summary
==========
The computer activities primarily consisted of "Coding," with one 
instance involving "Code editing and running a script."

How It Works

graph LR
    A[📸 Capture] --> B{Changed?}
    B -->|Yes| C[💾 Save]
    B -->|No| D[Skip]
    C --> E[🤖 AI Classify]
    E --> F[📊 Report]
  1. Capture — Screenshots taken every N seconds across all monitors
  2. Compare — Only saves when screen content actually changes
  3. Classify — GPT-4 Vision analyzes each window to determine activity
  4. Report — Aggregates data into human-readable summaries

Command Reference

Command Description
track Start tracking screen activity
summary Display activity summary
analyze-screenshots Analyze a directory of screenshots
check-permissions Verify screen recording permissions
screenshot Take a single screenshot
monitors Show connected monitors
windows Show visible windows
processes List running processes

Track Options

Option Default Description
--duration Minutes to track
--interval 5 Seconds between captures
--ai/--no-ai enabled AI classification
--min-pixels 1000 Change threshold

Requirements

  • Python 3.12+
  • macOS (Windows/Linux support planned)
  • Screen recording permission for your terminal

Development

# Clone and setup
git clone https://github.com/brycedrennan/time-guardian
cd time-guardian
make init

# Common commands
make test        # Run tests
make lint        # Run linter
make af          # Auto-format code
make check       # Run all checks

License

MIT


Stop wondering. Start knowing.pip install time-guard

Release files for time-guard 0.0.4

For a detailed explanation of source distributions (sdists) and built distributions (wheels), please see the package formats documentation.

Source distribution (sdist)

Source distribution for time-guard 0.0.4
File Size Uploaded
time_guard-0.0.4.tar.gz 2.2 MB Details

Built distribution (wheel)

Table of built distributions (wheels) for time-guard 0.0.4
File Interpreter ABI Platform
time_guard-0.0.4-py3-none-any.whl Python 3 none any Details

Total release size: 2.3 MB

Release files / time_guard-0.0.4.tar.gz

Download URL time_guard-0.0.4.tar.gz
Size 2.2 MB
Tags Source
SHA-256 checksum
How to use checksums
56afd6cb1f78e14217c18ffa0c31a06968777027d837d72a50373d1e26231079
BLAKE2b-256 checksum
How to use checksums
a80b3542867074c7677704a08406d02eb9b5591f9aaf0c10cf123aa239e3f911
Upload date
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing?
What is trusted publishing?
No
Uploaded via twine/6.2.0 CPython/3.12.8

Release files / time_guard-0.0.4-py3-none-any.whl

Download URL time_guard-0.0.4-py3-none-any.whl
Size 28.9 kB
Tags Python 3
SHA-256 checksum
How to use checksums
30ee75fae7b9d005291d854a37314ac443fa18374c11af6ba72ac83f4565e98b
BLAKE2b-256 checksum
How to use checksums
9c14622e59482754300d840d78523e248cdd39865613f0fc477cbd3753fe9f75
Upload date
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing?
What is trusted publishing?
No
Uploaded via twine/6.2.0 CPython/3.12.8

Release history Release notifications | RSS feed

This release

0.0.4 This release

2 release files

0.0.3

2 release files

Anthropic, PBC Visionary sponsor Bloomberg Visionary sponsor Hudson River Trading Visionary sponsor Meta Visionary sponsor NVIDIA Visionary sponsor Microsoft Sustainability sponsor Depot Continuous Integration AWS Cloud computing and Security Sponsor Datadog Monitoring Fastly CDN Google Download Analytics Sentry Error logging StatusPage Status page