Hello everyone,
I recently switched over from rescuetime and there is one feature which I really miss. Namely being able to categorize Events into Categories like Productive/Non-Productive/Learning/…
Having this higher level data available makes it a lot easier to figure out what you spend your time on that day and how many billable hours you worked.
Are there any plans for a feature like that?
regards
Roman
It’s not something we are currently working on, but it is definitely something we want to support and have done some proof-of-concept on.
This is the github issue:
I’ve finally gotten around to implementing this (based on my experiments in aw-research).
Here’s the PR for the web UI:
And here’s a very WIP screenshot:
I’m happy to announce this feature was released a couple of days ago in v0.8.1!
We hope you enjoy and send us any feedback you might have 
Thanks for that work, which really make activity watch usefull for me !
How to get list of uncategorized events to find which rules are missing ?
(I didn’t found documentation on how to query events by category)
We have also thought of this and want such a feature in the web-ui, it is currently not possible but we have in mind to implement such a thing somewhat soon.
We’ve added this in ActivityWatch 0.8.4 (that we released today!). You can now use the “category filter” in the Activity view to find uncategorized events.
Thanks you, it will be really usefull !
Just to notice you, the filter seems to not work in “Window” tab
Nice feature thanks!
Is it possible to export/save the categories (kind of backup)?
I actually have some issues with this feature: sometimes I can create few entries with no problems but after a while I can not anymore. If I close the webUI tab and reopen it I then loose all the already inserted categories (sorry to be vague but I’m new and still learning how to use activitywatch)…
Export/import of categories will be done soon, we’re not too far away from making that possible.
The categories are currently saved in the browser (but not for much longer when the import/export is implemented). Others have had issues with their browsers deleting all data from the websites local storage after closing the tab, maybe it’s something similar for you? What browser are you using and do you have any extensions which might be the culprit?
Ok perfect thanks!
I’ve seen the discussion with a guy having problems in saving the config in firefox and effectively I also solved my issue allowing the cookies from the localhost! Now everything seems to be fine
Thanks for getting this!
Is there a way we could get ActivityWatch to list out all of the uncategorized activities so that we could categorize them individually? That way, we can see all of the uncategorized activities and categorize them without needing an in-bulk rule
It is possible to filter to only see events which are not matched by a category, but it is not possible to individually categorize them. I doubt how useful such a feature would be considering how many events are generated per hour, it would be a huge chore to categorize them individually (and if you only categorized the longest one it would not be completely accurate due to not categorizing the shorter ones).
Yes, this is a good point, but say that I am working for 3 hours on a specific Word document with the name “The Lair of Mysteries”. Instead of having to come up with a Regex that only matches this one document (and that doesn’t match future documents) to categorize it, I could just categorize this one activity without worrying about miscategorizing other activities.
Totally agree.
It would be a dream to right-click an uncategorized event and had two options:
“Add Event to Category Rule Regex” -> would open modal/popover to select the rule category and auto add it to the regex.
“Categorize Individual Event to…” -> would open modal/popover to select the category and categorize that only specify event to the category
ManicTime works like this if I remember correctly
Couldn’t agree more. Regexes are not user-friendly, although they’re handy as an advanced feature for developers. I want to right-click on the uncategorized event, and categorize the app (or the domain/subdomain name in case of browser activity), or add it to an existing category.
Also, for clarity, it might be easier to have a list of matching regexes than one big difficult-to-read regex.
What I basically want from my activity watcher is a category summary of how I spent my hours during the day, categories are more valuable than individual activities for summaries, and I need the app to make it really easy & fast to categorize efficiently.
Lack of this feature (category intelligent fast-assignement) makes the product very unpractical for my usecase. I will follow this thread and uninstall the app until improvements are made.
I am in the same boat. Did you end up finding a useful time tracker that allows you to categorize events / url visits efficiently?
This comment is very useful, I’d put this somewhere in the documentation in categorization because it took me quite a while to get here.