This May, GitHub featured PersonalAnalytics in their Maintainer Month spotlight: a series celebrating open-source maintainers in academia. I’m honored to be included.

PersonalAnalytics started as my master’s thesis and grew into a tool I use for my own research: a privacy-focused, locally-running app that helps knowledge workers reflect on their work habits — time spent, productivity, and well-being — without sending any data to the cloud. Over the past decade, it has been used in field studies with around 1,500 participants and contributed to more than a dozen peer-reviewed publications.

What I didn’t anticipate was how others would build on it. Researchers now use it as a ready-made foundation for their own studies; students extend it for their theses and contribute improvements back. In 2025, we rewrote the tool from scratch to make it more extensible and maintainable for both Windows and macOS.

Keeping it alive on the side isn’t always straightforward: academic incentives reward publications, not maintenance. But seeing the project grow beyond what I originally built it for makes the effort worthwhile.

Feel free to try it out to learn more about how you spend your time on your computer, productivity and well-being: https://github.com/HASEL-UZH/PersonalAnalytics/releases/latest
If you’re a researcher and interested in leveraging PersonalAnalytics for your project, please check out the repo (or contact me in case of questions): https://github.com/HASEL-UZH/PersonalAnalytics