An hourly check-in for your Obsidian daily note
Most daily notes are written once, at the start or the end of the day, and the entry is either a to-do list or a vague paragraph rebuilt from memory. One sentence written while the hour is still fresh is more accurate and takes about ten seconds.
How it works
- Hourly sits in the Windows tray and counts real activity. A locked screen, sleep and suspend all pause the clock.
- Once an hour a small window asks what you just did. One sentence, at least 50 characters by default (you can change this in Settings).
- The answer is added to today's daily note as a timestamped line, for example
14:00 - wrote the forum post. It is plain markdown written to the file on disk.
Why not an Obsidian plugin?
Hourly is a separate tray app, so it works while Obsidian is closed, and it only appends a line to the note for the day. You choose the vault folder once, then pick how your daily notes are organised from a short list. You can also choose one of your own notes and Hourly works out the pattern from it.
Works without Obsidian too
Every entry is also kept in a file on your computer, so Hourly is useful even if you do not use a notes folder. You can export a day, a week or a month as Markdown, plain text or JSON and give it to an AI assistant to ask where your time went.
Privacy
No account, no cloud and no sync. Your entries stay on your computer. The source code is public, so you can read exactly what the app does.