Documentation

How tracking works

Attune Focus classifies your time into four states, all computed locally: Active (the focused app with recent input), Passive (an unfocused app with confirmed ongoing work, such as a video playing or a build running), Idle (the focused app with no recent input), and Background (open and unfocused, with no confirmed work). This is why the app avoids a single misleading “screen time” number — five minutes of Idle time in an editor is a different signal than five minutes of Active time in it.

Tracking uses Windows last-input timestamps and foreground-window signals, plus brief CPU sampling for a small set of supported background apps to estimate whether they’re actually doing work (that raw sampling is not stored). It never reads typed characters, key codes, pointer coordinates, clipboard contents or screenshots.

Overview

The daily summary. Actual Attention and Foreground Time summarize today’s tracked activity; Active Focus is the share of your foreground time that was Active rather than Idle; Engagement is a single measured attention score for the day. Use the arrows next to the date to step back through history — the current day updates live, past days are a fixed read-only snapshot.

Time Distribution breaks the day into hourly Active/Passive/Idle/Background bars. Attention Quality turns the day into a 0–100 score with the contributing factors shown underneath: active focus share, work continuity (how long your focused blocks run before switching apps), fragmentation, foreground switch rate, and passive work share. Application Activity lists every app used that day with its actual time, foreground/background split, and an engagement percentage.

Timeline

A chronological log of app open/close/foreground events for the selected day, with background-only helper processes grouped and collapsible so the list stays readable. Use this when you want to reconstruct what happened during a specific stretch of time rather than read a summary.

Applications

Three views: Installed (everything discovered on your machine, searchable, with per-app tracking toggles), Running (what’s open right now, foreground app first), and Browser tabs (open tabs by domain, when the browser companion is connected — see below). Turning tracking off for an app stops future collection for it and hides its existing history from normal reports.

Focus

Two independent tools. A timed focus session blocks a chosen set of apps for a set duration. Permanent blocking keeps a chosen set of apps blocked indefinitely, with no timer to manage — turn it on or off per app whenever you want. Blocking can close a running application when it takes effect, so test it first on something with no unsaved work; this is a focus aid, not tamper-proof parental-control software.

Rules and browser protection

Rules control application usage alerts, daily website time limits, and browser-feature suppression. Website limits and feature suppression need the optional browser companion connected (see below) — the desktop app’s own tracking and app blocking work without it.

Attune Focus currently supports 8 browser protection features, each toggleable per rule and visible in the app’s own “Supported Browser Protection Features” catalog on the Rules page: YouTube Shorts suppression, YouTube home-page recommendations, YouTube autoplay, Reddit’s infinite feed, Reddit’s r/popular and r/all links, Reddit’s sidebar recommendations, Instagram Reels, and Instagram Explore. Each one hides the algorithmic, attention-grabbing surface while leaving the rest of the site — direct links, search, messages, subscriptions — fully usable.

Insights

A weekly view: seven daily attention bars, grouped by calendar week, so you can see trends rather than a single day in isolation. Comparisons only appear once there’s enough history to compare against — the app won’t fabricate a trend from one day of data.

Browser companion setup

The browser companion is a separate extension (Chrome/Chromium or Firefox/Zen) that connects to the desktop app over a local native-messaging channel — no data leaves your machine through it. It’s what makes website limits and browser-feature suppression possible, and what populates the Browser tabs view. Install it from the links on the download page, then check the connection status in Settings. Private and incognito browsing is excluded from tracking by design.

Settings

Pause or resume tracking, configure history retention and run cleanup, export activity as Markdown or text, set the app to launch at Windows startup, manage window-title privacy per app (titles are excluded by default; you can opt an app into full-title recording, which may then contain personal information), check or repair the browser companion connection, and send feedback directly to the team. Closing the main window leaves Attune Focus running in the tray — use the tray menu to pause tracking or exit fully.

Data and privacy

Everything above is processed and stored locally in a SQLite database under your Windows user account. There is no cloud sync of activity history. See the full privacy policy for exactly what’s collected, how retention and exports work, and how to remove local data entirely. For install issues or anything not covered here, see Support.