Have you ever found yourself sitting at your Mac at the end of the day, looking at the clock and saying “Geez, where did the day go?” I know I have—especially back when I was running macosxhints.com and holding a full-time day job at the same time.

It was during this period that I mentioned to Peter, almost in passing, “Gee, it’d be cool if there were an app that sort of kept track of what I was doing on my Mac.”

The next day, in typical Peter fashion, my inbox contained a rough-but-functional program that did just that: tracked my open applications. I don’t even remember what it was called, and I have only the most basic recollection of what it looked like…but it worked. At that time, Peter was working by himself, and decided he didn’t have the time or inclination to do much more with the app, so there it sat.

Fast forward many years, and as we were looking for a product to help broaden the Many Tricks product line, Peter mentioned the old usage tracking program. After some back-and-forth, we both felt it was a natural addition to our suite of utilities. The rough code was smoothed out, features were added, beta testers provided feedback, and out of all that, we’re thrilled to announce Time Sink, Many Tricks’ newest application.

Time Sink is a small utility (designed to be running any time your Mac is in use) that watches and records time spent in both applications and windows within those applications. Time Sink records both foreground and background usage of those applications and windows, and creates on-the-fly reports showing your usage trends over time.

You can also group applications and/or windows together into pools, which are then also tracked over time. Using pools, for instance, you could group all related work for a given client or project together, to see how much of your time that client or project is using. Windows and/or applications that you’d rather not track can be added to a blacklist, so they won’t be tracked by Time Sink.

In addition to viewing reports, you can also export your usage data, in case you’d like to do more analysis in a program such as Excel, Numbers, FileMaker Pro, or any program that can read delimited text files.

Time Sink can be run as a typical Mac OS X application, or as a menubar application (which is my preference). In either mode, your activities over time are only a click away. Time Sink will run with all features enabled for two weeks. After that, usage of pools, reports, and exports will be limited until you register.

Time Sink is available immediately from our web site, and costs $19. If you’ve always wondered where your time goes, download the free trial today and find out.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 28th, 2010 at 11:02 am by Rob Griffiths and Peter Maurer, and is filed under Company News, Products, Time Sink. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.