Your browser time cardiogram — a privacy-first, local-only focus tracker.
TimeWise turns your browsing into a "flow cardiogram": it surfaces your deep-focus streaks, golden focus hours, and context-switching habits — without sending a single byte off your machine.
Manifest V3 · 100% local storage · Zero network requests
The dashboard follows your OS appearance — dark (left) and light (right).
Golden focus hours — a 7-day × 24-hour heatmap of when your deep focus peaks.
App rankings, color-coded by category.
Most time trackers either ship your activity to a cloud dashboard or guilt-trip you with raw screen-time totals. TimeWise does neither. It runs entirely in your browser, stores everything in local IndexedDB, and frames your data around flow — the uninterrupted stretches where you actually do your best work.
- Flow cardiogram — your longest unbroken focus streak, which can span multiple tools (docs → GitHub → localhost) as one continuous session.
- Golden focus hours — a 7-day × 24-hour heatmap showing when your deep focus actually peaks, so you can schedule important work there.
- App/domain rankings — daily and weekly, color-coded by category (productive / distracting / unclassified).
- Daily focus goal — set a target and track today's focused hours against it.
- Weekly micro-experiments — one small, personalized suggestion each week based on your real patterns.
- Light & dark themes — follows your OS appearance automatically
(
prefers-color-scheme). - CSV export — your data is yours; take it anywhere.
- Bilingual — English and 简体中文.
This is the whole point, so to be explicit:
- No network requests. TimeWise never contacts any server. (The only outbound link is an optional "buy me a coffee" link you choose to click.)
- All data stays in your browser, in local IndexedDB.
- No accounts, no telemetry, no analytics.
- Events older than 90 days are auto-pruned.
You can verify all of the above by reading the source — it's deliberately small.
TimeWise isn't on the Chrome Web Store yet. To run it locally:
- Clone or download this repository.
- Open
chrome://extensionsin Chrome (or any Chromium browser). - Enable Developer mode (top-right toggle).
- Click Load unpacked and select the project's root folder
(the one containing
manifest.json). - Click the TimeWise icon to open your dashboard.
The badge on the icon shows today's focused hours once you've browsed a bit.
TimeWise requests only what it needs to measure focus locally:
| Permission | Why |
|---|---|
tabs |
Read the active tab's domain to attribute focus time |
storage |
Persist events and settings in local storage |
idle |
Detect when you step away so idle time isn't counted as focus |
alarms |
Schedule periodic badge refresh and the distraction check |
notifications |
Optional "time check" nudges when you linger on distracting sites |
There is no host_permissions for reading page content — TimeWise only ever
looks at the tab's domain, never what's on the page.
Plain vanilla JS, no framework, no build step for the app itself:
manifest.json MV3 manifest
background.js Service worker: tab/idle tracking, badge, notifications
lib/
tracker.js Session start/heartbeat/settle state machine
classifier.js Domain -> category (productive / distracting)
aggregator.js Builds the weekly report (flow, golden hours, rankings)
db.js IndexedDB access (via Dexie)
dexie.mjs Bundled Dexie
chart.min.js Bundled Chart.js
ui/
dashboard.html/.js The main dashboard
settings.html/.js Category customization & goal
toast.js Content-script "what were you doing?" prompt
_locales/ en + zh_CN messages
assets/icons/ App icons (+ source SVG)
The extension runs directly from source — no compilation. For packaging, the repo
uses a build/ directory (a flat copy of the runtime files) that is gitignored;
load either the repo root or your own packaged copy.
Icons are rendered from assets/icons/icon-transparent.svg. To regenerate the PNGs
you'll need sharp locally (it's intentionally
not a committed dependency, since it's never shipped).
Contributions welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md.
MIT © 2026 mingming