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 soon
Whatchu 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.
Free forever for tracking. Your first weekly report is free too.
No account. No cloud. No subscription.
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.
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.
Whatchu 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 — with no judgement attached. No scores. 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.
Whatchu Doing puts the other one on the record.
Students: 40% off Pro →
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 | Whatchu 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 there is no server, because I didn't build one.
Once a week, when you ask for a report, your log and your goals are sent to Anthropic's API using your own key — a direct line from your machine to theirs. It doesn't pass through me. I couldn't read your logs if I wanted to.
What it costs
Free
$0forever
Pro
$29once
Founding
$59once
One payment. No subscription — it runs on your own computer.
60 days to change your mind. No questions, no form, no "reason for cancelling".
Students: 40% off Pro.
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.
Because the alternative is me running a server, holding your data, and charging you monthly for it. This way your logs never leave your machine except on your instruction, and the app costs $29 instead of $8 a month forever. A managed version is coming for people who'd rather not deal with keys.
One person who built this because he needed it, and who has been using it on himself since [DATE]. The public changelog is here. If it doesn't work for you, take the refund.
Something I haven't answered? Email me — there's no support team, so it's just me reading it.
Not live yet
Join the waitlist and I'll send the link the moment it's ready — plus the founding price before it goes up. One email. No spam, no drip sequence.
Windows first, macOS to follow.
Find out what you actually did this week. The first report is free.
Join the waitlistWindows first, macOS to follow.
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