Dayflow

A private, automatic work journal for Mac.

Dayflow understands the work you do on your Mac and turns it into a clear timeline of your day. Built from the ground up for privacy, it’s open source, local-first, and can run entirely with local AI.

Automatic Timeline

Dayflow turns raw screen activity into a chronological timeline of what you actually did, so you can reconstruct the day without timers or manual notes.

Daily Standup

See a GitHub-style activity grid of your day, plus yesterday's highlights, today's priorities, and blockers, so you can walk into standup with the update already written.

Weekly Review

See your week at a glance: when you were focused, where time went, which apps dominated, and what pulled you off track.

Chat With Your Work Journal

Ask questions about your day/week/year and get answers grounded in your timeline instead of digging through notes, screenshots, or memory.

What Dayflow Does

Dayflow runs quietly on your Mac and builds a useful record of your day from your screen activity.

Feature	How it works	Why it's useful
Automatic timeline	Dayflow captures lightweight screen chunks, analyzes them with your chosen AI provider, and turns the day into activity cards.	You get an accurate work journal without starting timers or writing notes.
Context-aware summaries	It looks at what you were actually doing on screen, not just which app was active.	Cursor, Chrome, YouTube, or Slack become meaningful work context instead of vague app usage.
Daily standup	Dayflow pulls yesterday's highlights, today's tasks, and blockers from your timeline.	You can write updates in minutes and stop relying on memory.
Chat with your work journal	Ask natural-language questions about your timeline and recent activity.	You can recover details, explain where time went, and turn raw activity into useful answers.
Weekly review	It aggregates your timeline into focus patterns, categories, app usage, and interaction graphs.	You can see where the week actually went and spot the habits that helped or hurt.
Distraction tracking	Dayflow identifies distracting sessions and shows them alongside focused work.	You can catch drift early without manually labeling every break.
Timeline export	Export your timeline as Markdown for any date range.	Useful for status updates, client notes, personal reviews, or saving a searchable record.
Local-first storage	Recordings, timeline data, and the app database stay on your Mac by default.	You stay in control of sensitive screen history and can delete it whenever you want.
AI provider choice	Use local models, Gemini, ChatGPT, or Claude depending on your privacy and quality needs.	You can trade off privacy, cost, speed, and summary quality instead of being locked into one backend.
Automatic cleanup	Configure storage limits and let Dayflow purge old recordings automatically.	You get the value of a work journal without filling your disk forever.

Why People Use It

Most time trackers tell you which app was open. Dayflow tries to understand what you were doing.

Cursor for two hours could mean shipping a feature, debugging auth, reviewing a PR, or getting lost in setup. Dayflow gives you the context, not just the window title.

Privacy

Dayflow is local-first and open source.

Your recordings, timeline, and database live on your Mac at:

~/Library/Application Support/Dayflow/

You choose how AI analysis runs:

• Local models through Ollama or LM Studio
• Gemini with your own API key
• ChatGPT or Claude through their local CLI tools

If you choose a cloud provider, activity data needed for analysis is sent to that provider. If you choose local models, analysis stays on your machine.

Install

Download

Download the latest Dayflow.dmg from GitHub Releases:

Open the DMG, drag Dayflow into Applications, then grant macOS Screen & System Audio Recording permission when prompted.

Homebrew

brew install --cask dayflow

Requirements

• macOS 14+
• Screen & System Audio Recording permission
• Optional: Gemini API key, Ollama, LM Studio, Codex CLI, or Claude Code depending on your preferred AI provider

Build From Source

git clone https://github.com/JerryZLiu/Dayflow.git
cd Dayflow
open Dayflow/Dayflow.xcodeproj

Select the Dayflow scheme in Xcode and run it.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome. If you are planning a larger change, open an issue first so the scope is clear.

License

Dayflow is licensed under the MIT License.