This post contains an affiliate link. I bought Chronoid with my own money before I knew they had an affiliate program.

For years my time tracker was a free Chrome extension. Toggl.

Start a task, hit the button. Finish the task, hit it again. It worked, right up until it didn’t.

Some days I forgot to start it and lost the hour. Worse days I forgot to stop it, and a task I’d finished before lunch quietly ran until the next day.

Chronoid removes that extra step. It runs in the background on your Mac and records what you were doing, app by app, site by site, document by document.

Chronoid throws out the idle time on its own. There’s nothing to start and nothing to stop. It learns you as you keep using it, so the more you correct and move things around, the better it sorts the next batch by itself.

I ran the 7-day trial, then bought it. What sold me was the one-time payment instead of another monthly subscription.

A time tracker that never leaves your Mac

Your activity lives in a plain SQLite file on your own machine. You don’t even need an account to use it.

That matters more than you think. You don’t want a time tracker shipping your entire working life off to someone else’s servers, doing who knows what with it. Chronoid’s copy never leaves your machine, and it exports to a clean CSV any time you want it out.

What connecting an LLM actually adds to your workflow

The charts are genuinely good. I still eyeball them most days, and you can easily see which apps and websites you actually spent your time on.

Connecting a model makes that data act. You can point Chronoid at a local LLM through Ollama, LM Studio, or Apple Intelligence, or at a hosted one like Claude or ChatGPT using your own API key. Choose a local model and your prompts and results stay on the Mac too, which keeps the whole thing consistent with the rest of the app.

Once it’s connected, the model can do things the dashboard can’t:

  • Answer questions across your full history in natural language
  • Categorize activities you never got around to labeling
  • Create projects and sort past time into them
  • Reconstruct the real order you worked in, which is the raw material for an SOP
  • Write rules so future activity files itself automatically
  • Add ignore rules for what you don’t want counted

The last two are the real unlock. You can ask questions about what happened last week while continuously training it on how to sort the next six months.

There’s also a localhost-only MCP server, so Claude Desktop can query the same data directly:

Look at my Chronoid data for the last two weeks.

Find the 3 things that ate the most time without me ever deciding to spend it there. For each one: when it usually starts, what I was doing right before it started, and how long the average session ran.

Then tell me which single one is worth fixing first, and why that one. Be blunt. Don't be encouraging.

How I used Chronoid to create an SOP

I bought this to track billable hours while I was freelancing. The reason I still open it is something else entirely.

When I started hiring freelancers myself, I had to write an SOP for work I’d been doing on autopilot for years.

That is harder than it sounds.

You can’t recall your own process, because it became second nature.

Chronoid already had the answer sitting in its database. It tracks every app you touch, so I could read the real sequence: which tool I opened first, how long each part took, where I doubled back.

The SOP came together after that, and it was accurate, because it described what I actually did instead of what I assumed I did.

I did that by reading the charts. You can skip that step and ask for it directly, because the MCP server hands over your detailed activity spans and context switches:

Using my Chronoid data from [date] to [date], reconstruct how I actually worked on [project].

Give me the real order: which app I opened first, what I switched to next, how long each step took, and where I looped back to something earlier.

Then turn that sequence into a draft SOP a new freelancer could follow. Steps in order, with the tool named for each one. Don't invent steps I never did.

Chronoid markets this thing for daily reviews, standup notes and invoice prep. Not one word about documenting a process. It’s the best thing I get out of it.

Worth it or not

If you already know where your hours go, skip it. Not everyone needs this.

But if you bill by the hour, or you’re trying to document a process you’ve never written down, there’s a 7-day trial and you won’t have to worry about starting the timer anymore.

Try Chronoid