A minimal screen-on time tracker for Wayland.

Tracks how long your screen is active each day. Hooks into swayidle to detect screen on/off and suspend/resume events, persists daily totals to JSON, and correctly handles midnight boundaries.

State

• Runtime: $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/worktrack/ (tmpfs, no disk writes during tracking)
• Persist: $XDG_DATA_HOME/worktrack/YYYY-MM-DD.json

Usage

work-track on       # screen on  (swayidle resume / after-resume)
work-track off      # screen off (swayidle timeout / before-sleep)
work-track status   # print today's total
work-track save     # bank current session, persist to JSON
work-track log      # show last 7 days
mini-track stats N  # last N days (default: 1)

Integration

Add to your compositor startup config (e.g., Niri):

spawn-sh-at-startup "swayidle -w \
    timeout 300 'swaylock -f -i /usr/share/backgrounds/archlinux/snow.jpg' \
    timeout 600 'work-track off; niri msg action power-off-monitors' \
        resume 'work-track on' \
    before-sleep 'work-track off; swaylock -f -i /usr/share/backgrounds/archlinux/snow.jpg' \
    after-resume 'work-track on' &"

• resume → monitor wake
• after-resume → system resume

Why RAM state?

Runtime state lives in $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR (tmpfs/RAM) instead of writing straight to the JSON for two reasons:

1. Zero disk wear: If work-track status is used in a Waybar that updates every 5 seconds, writing to JSON would wear out your SSD. tmpfs allows instant, zero-wear reads/writes.

2. Crash safety: If the system loses power while the screen is active, the in-memory state is lost. This prevents writing an incorrect “always-on” session to disk, which would otherwise corrupt historical accuracy. At most, a small amount of unrecorded time is lost, while existing daily JSON data remains valid. A systemd timer reduces this gap to roughly ~5 minutes.

   See systemd for implementation details.

Waybar

{
  "custom/worktrack": {
    "exec": "work-track status",
    "interval": 60,
    "format": "⏱ {}"
  }
}

JSON Output

{
  "date": "2026-05-12",
  "seconds": 13335
}