The Screen Time feature first appeared on iOS 12 to help you monitor your app usage on iPhone and iPad. You are now on macOS Catalina, with a major flaw: it only shows how long the apps are open, not how long do you use them.
Fortunately, There are alternatives to Screen Time that are much better at tracking screen time than Apple's built-in tool..
The problem with the Screen Time app in Catalina
On iOS, cannot have more than two applications “focused” active on screen at the same time, but that's not the case on a Mac.
Most people leave apps open in the background on their Mac without even realizing it.. Do you ever close your browser? Are you listening to music right now through Spotify or Catalina's iTunes replacement? Are the applications you use for email open?, notes or calendar? What applications are open in the menu bar at the top of the screen?
Screen Time tracks open apps, instead of the ones in use today. Due, does not provide meaningful data on where your time has gone. Can't see how much of your day was spent writing a report, reading, replying to emails or browsing Facebook.
As a last resort, this makes Screen Time pretty useless on a Mac if you want to use it to increase your productivity. A workaround is to close the apps as soon as you are done with them, but this is not how the vast majority of people use their computer. If you want to isolate which apps are running out of time, will have to find an alternative.
Screen time has parental control
Con Screen Time, Apple also merged its existing parental controls into a single interface.. Alternatives previously available in System Preferences> Parental Controls can now be found in the control panel under System Preferences> Screen Time.
This includes the ability to restrict content based on age ratings., block adult websites and play multiplayer games through Game Center. You can also set “Inactivity time” in which the applications must be included in the white list for their use. So far so good.
You can also set limits on how long an app can be used in the App Limits portion of Screen Time preferences.. In theory, this looks great. Click the plus sign (+) to add an app or category you want to limit, and then set the amount of time that the application or category can be used each 24 hours. Boundaries reset at midnight.
Unfortunately, app boundaries are subject to the same arbitrary oversight as any other app. As an example, if you set a time limit of two hours per day for Safari, the timer is activated while the app is open, even if no one is using it. If you have children, they will probably be the first to realize how shortsighted and "unfair" this is.
Setting limits for kids is part of promoting healthy engagement with modern technology. Unfortunately, Apple's tools to do this are half.
Parents can still use downtime to limit apps between set times and content filtering to prevent their kids from being exposed to adult content.
Notifications and snapshots are not very helpful
Screen Time also tracks how many notifications you receive, as well as pickups (the number of times you wake up your Mac from sleep or restart it).
It's much easier to drown notifications on your Mac than on iOS. On a mac, media players, like Music and Spotify, send a new notification every time the track changes. If you are low on disk space or waiting for a macOS update, will be dismissing notifications throughout the day. This feature is not necessarily broken in the same way as app tracking, but it's not very useful either.
The pills manage to be even less useful. On an iPhone or iPad, Pickups tracks how many times you unlock your device and which app was responsible. This can be useful if you want to limit your notifications or certain apps throughout working hours to boost your productivity.. You can check Collections to find out which apps distract you the most.
Despite this, on a mac, this doesn't make much sense. Notifications don't wake up the screen or demand the same attention as on iOS. When I stop playing Music and wake up my Mac, Screen Time records Music in Pickups as the reason I woke up my Mac. Actually, I just wanted to wake up the computer so I could get back to work.
Best alternatives to macOS screen time
Apps that track your computer usage are nothing new. Some people use them to boost and track their productivity. Some freelancers who charge an hourly rate use them to create reports. Others simply use them to remind themselves that they actually did something throughout the day..
Moment is one of the most successful applications of its kind. It is enabled on three levels: Productivity ($ 39), Professional ($ 69) o Expert ($ 99). In its most basic configuration, Timing automatically tracks how much time you spend on each application and includes information such as window title and route name.
All data is collected and displayed on the Review screen. This is where you can see what apps you have used. You can also organize usage by project or task. You will see the websites you have visited, relevant keywords (as the title of a project) and the folders he frequents the most.
Timing app is best for people who like to participate in their productivity. The app can generate a productivity score, but how this function works depends on how you organize the data. You can export your data in raw.CSV format. If you update, can export in XLS and PDF formats and generate invoices.
If you opt for the Professional edition of Timing, you can add data points for manual tasks you complete outside of your Mac, so you can keep track of every aspect of your day. If you need to fully customize the reports, generate invoices and a Zapier API and plugin, choose the Expert level. You can also find the expert version of Timing at SetApp.
Time sink is another alternative and it only costs $ 5. It is much easier to use than Timing, but it works the same way. The application automatically and accurately tracks the time spent in various applications. You can also manually record the activities you do outside of your Mac.
Time Sink uses Pools to help you keep track of associated activities. Because it groups similar activities into categories (What “Chatter”), get a broad overview of where your time is going, not even Screen Time does this. Time Sink also records both the total time an application is open and the amount of time you actively use it.. You can see all this in the Activity Report of the application.
If you need more powerful functions, such as invoice generation or an API, Time Sink is not for you. Despite this, if you just need an inexpensive app to help you keep track of your daily habits and improve your productivity, Time Sink could be the best $ 5 what i spent this week.
ActivityWatch is a free time tracking application for Mac, Windows y Linux. Automatically records your activity on your Mac, including which apps you use and which domains you spend most of your time on. A small application runs in the background to compile the data, what you can see in your browser.
Other similar Mac apps that automatically track your app usage include ManicTime, RescueTime, and WakaTime,
Use screen time for parental controls
None of the alternatives to Screen Time offer anything like the parental controls that Apple has incorporated into its native function.. If you want to use parental controls on your Mac, you still need to set screen time.
Despite this, if you mainly want to track exactly what you are doing with your time during your business day, has much more accurate options than Screen Time.
How Apple Could Do This So Wrong, when products like Timing and Time Sink have done well for so long, it's disconcerting.
