nothing leaves your machine
ScreenYourScreen keeps a quiet record of your day — what you worked on, what pulled you away, and whether you came back. There's no timer to start and no form to fill in. You open it at six and it's already written.
The dashboard
One page, three things worth knowing: where the hours actually went, whether being stopped changed anything, and how this month is going compared to the last one. Here's the whole of it.
By category
Top sites
The bar at the top is the whole day at a glance. Under it, the same hours split two ways — by the kind of work, and by the sites you spent them on. The three numbers at the bottom are the tell for a scattered day: how often you hopped tabs, how many times you circled back to the same one, and how much of it you actually spent settled.
Did being stopped change anything?
64%you backed off
Every time it stopped you, it wrote down what you did next. Backing off is a win, carrying on is a leak, and it keeps score either way.
30 days agotoday
Every day as one bar — by day, week or month. The short ones are weekends. Click any bar to get that day back in full.
The bar fills as you work — half an hour of it earns a credit, and the toolbar icon does the same thing so you can see it without opening anything. Spend one and it runs the other way, counting down the five minutes you bought.
This tab
On tracknews.ycombinator.com
A long argument about how database indexes actually work. Close enough to today's work to leave alone.
Why this page is being left alone, or why it isn't — one sentence, in plain words, not a score. If it got you wrong there are two buttons: wrong call, and always allow.
Last hour
The last hour, longest first, with how today is going so far. Open it, look, close it.
When it couldn't tell — an odd page, or it simply wasn't sure — those minutes are marked unscored rather than guessed at, and they sit outside the split instead of quietly padding the good column. A number about your own day is only worth having if it admits what it doesn't know.
What it notices
Reading something fascinating that has nothing to do with your work isn't laziness — it's curiosity, and it costs you the afternoon anyway. So does a good day chopped into twelve-minute pieces. Different problems, so they never get blended into one number.
Relevance
Does this page serve what you said you'd do today?
read from the page itself
Focus
Are you settled in, or bouncing?
how long you stay · how often you come back
Coherence coming
Does today hang together as one piece of work?
how close each page sits to the rest
How it decides
A blocklist sees youtube.com and stops. ScreenYourScreen sees the page — the title, the headline, what's actually on it — and holds it up against the one sentence you wrote about what you're doing today. Same site, two very different afternoons.
You set it once
A sentence about what you're working on. That's the whole of the setup.
change it whenever the work changes
It keeps your calls
Tell it once how you feel about a site and it stops asking. Most pages never need a second thought.
wrong call · always allow
The rest, it reads
A page it can't place gets read properly and judged on what it says — on your machine, in about half a second.
roughly one page in fifteen
When you drift
Between 7am and 7pm, a page that's clearly not yours goes blurry and the scrolling stops. You can close the tab. Or you can pay for it.
Earn
+1 credit
for every half hour of real work. Time spent away from the keyboard doesn't count. Credits keep stacking up.
Spend
5 minutes
one credit buys you five minutes on one site. The toolbar icon fills up while you earn and counts down while you spend.
Or argue
Justify
make your case to a skeptical gatekeeper. Something specific and plausible earns a few minutes. "This is work" doesn't.
All of it lands back on the dashboard: how often it stopped you, and what you did next. After hours it goes soft — the page still stops you, but continuing is free and buys you half an hour. Focus mode can be switched on. It can't be switched off in the moment you most want to.
Privacy
Everything sent off your computer · all time
nothing to show
0 requests · 0 bytes · no account, ever
There's no sign-up, no sync and no server, because the extension doesn't talk to anything. Everything on that dashboard was worked out on your own machine and stays there. There's an export button if you want a copy of it, a wipe button if you want it gone, and uninstalling takes the rest with it.
Install
It isn't in the Chrome Web Store yet, so you add it by hand.
Download the folder and put it somewhere you won't delete it.
In Chrome, open the Extensions page and switch on Developer mode.
Click Load unpacked and choose that folder.
Write one sentence about what you're working on. That's the whole setup.
Best on Chrome 138 or newer, which is what lets it read pages on your own machine. On older versions it still runs, just more bluntly — it goes on what it knows about a site rather than what's on the page, and it tells you so. It's a small pile of plain files with nothing bolted on, if you'd rather check than take our word for it.
Changelog
1.0.0
The first release
coming
What's next