Quarter Past asks what you’re working on. Every fifteen minutes.
A small app that lives in your Mac’s menu bar. One tap answers it, and the quarter-hour that just passed is already logged — so the day stops disappearing into hours you can’t account for.
For Mac · 14 days free, then £54 once · Never reads your screen
What have you been doing?
Whatever you pick is logged from 09:00 until now.
How it works
A quarter of an hour, start to finish. Scroll down and it plays — the clock, the prompt and the record all move as you go.
Scroll to play
Nine o'clock. You start something.
No timer to press. Nothing to set up.
Fifteen minutes go by.
This is the part every other tracker loses.
It asks.
In the menu bar, out of the way. One key dismisses it.
One tap fills in the quarter you just spent.
Answering at 09:15 records 09:00 to 09:15. Backwards, not forwards.
The rest of the day goes the same way.
Four taps an hour, and the gaps stay gaps — lunch is not quietly filled in for you.
By five, you have the day.
No timer was ever started, and nothing was reconstructed from memory.
09:00
This is the whole app.
No dashboard to configure, no workspace to set up. One window that fills itself in as the day goes on.
What you meant to do, against what you did
Both halves in one place, with the difference worked out. Nothing is scored, and a line nothing measures says so rather than showing a zero.
Six looks, one app
The same data and the same buttons in whichever register suits you. This is the same afternoon as the screen above it, wearing something else.
Four words, and how they fit.
Projects hold tasks. Tapping a task, or answering the quarter-hour check, makes an entry. The entries are the record; the plan is what you meant, set beside them at the end of the week.
- Project
- The broad thing your time goes on: a client, the business, the house. You will have a few. A name, not a description.
- Task
- One of the things you actually do within a project: emails, drawings, site visits, invoicing. Tapping one starts the clock.
- Entry
- A stretch of time on one task, from when it started to when it stopped. Entries are the record; everything the app reports is added up from them.
- Note
- A line of detail on an entry: which drawing, which call. The detail goes here, so project and task names stay short.
- Time check
- The question the app asks every quarter of an hour. Answering logs the time since it last asked as an entry, so forgetting to press start costs nothing.
- Add time
- An entry written after the fact, for a stretch you were away from the Mac. The record marks it as recalled rather than measured.
- Plan
- What you meant to do this week, a line each, optionally tied to a project with a number of hours. At the end of the week the entries sit beside it and the difference is shown.
- Accounted for
- The bar under the clock: how much of your target day the entries cover so far, with the gaps listed so you can fill the ones that were work.
It asks. It never watches.
The usual cure for forgetting is surveillance — the app reads your screen, your documents and the sites you visit. This one has no idea what is on your screen. Everything it knows, you told it in one tap.
Works entirely offline
No account, no sync, no server. Pull the network cable and nothing changes.
Your data is a file you own
Readable, exportable and yours to back up, whatever happens to the app or the licence.
Anything can be corrected
Change a start time, add a session, split a block, undo a delete. An honest record is one you're allowed to fix.
You planned the week. This is what happened.
Write down what you mean to do. The app keeps the other half itself.
Nothing is scored and there is no streak to keep. It puts the two columns side by side and stops there. What to make of the difference is yours.
It says so rather than showing a zero somebody would read as a failure.
A coach asked me to track my time.
I didn't, properly. I'd remember on the Tuesday, forget by the Thursday, and turn up having reconstructed the fortnight in the car.
Which wasted half the session, mine and his. Every tracker I tried either needed me to remember, or wanted to read my screen to find out.
So this one asks instead. It's the tool I wanted for that conversation, and I use it every working day for exactly that.
You can earn money back. You cannot earn back an hour.
That asymmetry is the entire argument for knowing where the hours go. It is also why this is one payment and not a bill that arrives every year for the privilege of finding out.
Use it free for a fortnight first. When the fourteen days are up the app offers a licence, and this is what it costs.
£54
one payment · one Mac · yours to keep
- 14 days free, no card
- Move it between Macs whenever you like
- Free updates, any Mac from macOS 10.15
- An expired licence never locks you out of your own data
Totals paid by the end of each period. Subscriptions are quoted by the month because it makes them sound small — run the arithmetic forwards and Tyme is £4.17 a month for ever, Timing £7.00. Keep this five years and it works out at 90p a month, and then it keeps going for nothing. Prices checked 14 September 2026.
Download it. Give it a fortnight.
Free for fourteen days, with no card and no account. If it earns its place, it's £54 once, paid from inside the app.
Questions worth asking
Does it really never read my screen?
Never. It has no screen-recording or accessibility permissions, and it cannot see your apps, documents or browsing. The only thing it knows is what you tapped.
Won't a prompt every fifteen minutes drive me mad?
It appears in the menu bar rather than taking focus, one key dismisses it, and it stays silent outside the hours and days you choose. You can set the interval to 5, 10, 30 or 60 minutes instead.
What if I miss one?
It asks again, still holding the whole interval. Nothing is lost by not being at the desk, and you can fill a gap in afterwards.
Where does my data live?
In a file on your Mac that you can read, export and back up. There is no account and no server, and an expired licence never blocks you from reading, editing or exporting what you already have.
Can I get my time out for invoicing?
Yes — the record exports, and the week can be broken down by project. It isn't an invoicing suite, and isn't trying to be.