You write down what the week is for
Monthly goals, weekly objectives, today's tasks. This becomes the rubric you get graded against, not some vendor's idea of what counts as productive.
Desktop app · Windows · macOS · Linux
Whatcha Doing interrupts you at intervals, asks what you just did, and writes it down. On Sunday it reads your week back to you against the goals you set on Monday, and tells you whether you kept your word.
Your first week is free, with everything, report included.
No card. No AI key. No account.
How it works
Monthly goals, weekly objectives, today's tasks. This becomes the rubric you get graded against, not some vendor's idea of what counts as productive.
A pop. A dialog. One question: what did you do in the last however long it's been? You type one line. It closes. That's the whole interaction.
Your log and your goals go to the analyst. It comes back with what you said you'd do, what you actually did, the pattern that explains the gap, and one instruction for next week.
On a paid plan, the end of each month brings a monthly report too: what you achieved, how the weeks compared, the habits that kept costing you, and a plan for the next month.
09:00 AM – 10:30 AM (1h 30m): Deep work on the React component.
10:30 AM – 11:00 AM (30m): Scrolling Twitter (oops).
Is this you
You quit the job. Nobody schedules your day. Nobody asks how it's going. You're at the desk from nine to seven and you cannot honestly say what came out of it.
The problem isn't motivation. You have plenty. The problem is that there is no longer anything between you and a lost Tuesday.
Whatcha Doing is the manager you fired, minus the meetings.
Twenty minutes and three hours feel the same. You look up and it's 4pm. You've tried the trackers. They showed you a chart of your own failure and you deleted them within a fortnight.
This one doesn't wait for you to remember anything, and it doesn't tell you what your week says about you unless you ask it to. Set the analyst to Gentle and it reports what happened (the hours, the misses, the patterns) and the score, with no judgement in how it says it. No streaks to break.
You still get the truth. You just don't get lectured with it.
The thesis. The exam. The career change. Nobody will notice if you do nothing this week, or next week, or for a month, and then one day it will be catastrophically obvious.
You worked nine hours today. You produced two paragraphs. Both of those are true and only one of them is on the record.
Whatcha Doing puts the other one on the record.
Students: 40% off Lifetime →
Why not just use a tracker
Automatic trackers watch your screen. They can see that Chrome was open for 47 minutes. They cannot tell whether that was research or a rabbit hole, and they cannot see the two hours you spent working out a problem on a walk.
| Automatic trackers | Whatcha Doing | |
|---|---|---|
| Sees which app was open | Yes | No |
| Knows what you were actually doing | No | Yes, you told it |
| Sees work away from the screen | No | Yes |
| Grades you against | Its own categories | The goals you wrote |
| Where your data lives | Their servers | A text file on your machine |
| Costs | Every month, forever | Once |
A tracker gives you a chart.
This gives you a verdict.
The report
That's a real report on a real week of mine. I left in the part where it noticed I'd spent more time planning the launch than building it.
Three settings. The findings are identical: the numbers, the misses and the pattern don't move. Only the delivery changes.
Privacy
Everything you type stays on your computer as plain text, in a folder you choose, in a format you can read without this app. There is no account, and nothing is sent while you work.
Once a week, when your report is written, that week's log and your goals leave your computer. On Lifetime they go to the AI provider you picked (Anthropic, DeepSeek, Google Gemini or Perplexity) using your own key, a direct line from your machine to theirs that doesn't pass through me. On your free trial week and on Monthly they pass through my server to the AI and back. Nothing of your week is stored there.
What it costs
Free trial
$0for 7 days
Monthly
$5a month
Lifetime
$65once
Monthly: cancel any time, and it runs to the end of the month you paid for.
Monthly never renews by itself. When your month ends, pay again with your code and it carries on.
14 day money back guarantee on Lifetime and on your first Monthly payment. No questions, no form.
Students: 40% off Lifetime.
Every price and plan question on one page
The obvious questions
Probably, if you set it to every fifteen minutes on day one. Set it to ninety and turn on Deep Work mode when you need a long uninterrupted run. It'll hold its questions until you come back up. You can tell it to shut up. That's a feature, not an apology.
Then you've learned something no dashboard could have told you. Nobody lies to a tool they paid for to help them, so if you catch yourself typing something false at 3pm, pay attention to that. It's the most useful thing this app will ever do for you.
It has no opinion about what you should be doing. It only knows what you said you'd do. If your goal for the week was to rest, and you rested, you get a good report.
No. Your first week and Monthly are graded on my server with my key, so there's nothing to set up. Lifetime is the one that runs on your own key, which is how a single payment can cover reports forever: you pay the provider a few cents a report and I never sit in the middle.
I'm Alex. I build Whatcha Doing on my own, and I use it on myself every week. I built it because I'd sit at my desk all day and couldn't say what came out of it. If it doesn't work for you, take the refund.
The app keeps working. Your log and your plan are plain-text files on your own computer, there's no account to shut down, and Lifetime is a one-time payment that runs on your own AI key, so it doesn't depend on me either. If you're on Monthly and it ever closed, you'd paste in a key of your own and carry on. You'd stop getting updates, and that's all.
Something I haven't answered? Email me. There's no support team, so it's just me reading it.
Free tools
They run in your browser or print on paper. No account, and the quiz and the hours check save nothing.
Gentle, Honest or Brutal: which coach do you need? Seven questions.
Take the quiz → Two minutesHours at your desk yesterday against hours on your plan, from your own numbers.
Check yesterday → PrintableA weekly review, a weekly plan and a thesis week kit, readable in full.
See the templates →Free download
No account and no email. Download it, open it, and write down what this week is for.
Windows
Whatchu-Doing.exe · 28 MB
Windows may say "unknown publisher" because the app isn't signed yet. Choose More info, then Run anyway.
DownloadmacOS
Whatchu-Doing.dmg · 23 MB · Apple silicon or Intel
The first time you open it, macOS will ask you to confirm. Go to System Settings, then Privacy & Security, then Open Anyway.
DownloadLinux (Ubuntu)
Whatchu-Doing-linux-x86_64.tar.gz · 239 MB
Unpack it and run ./Whatchu-Doing. Built for Ubuntu on x86-64.
Always the latest version. You accept the Terms of Use before the file starts.
No account and no email to download. If you'd rather get the first week as a short course, the First Week emails walk you through the key, the first three days and your first Sunday.
Find out what you actually did this week. The first week is free.
Download freeWindows · macOS · Linux
What did you do?
In the last 0m
Logged.
Added to this week's file
That took six seconds and you now have a record of it. Do that all week and something reads it back to you on Sunday.
Download free