Help · Mac

Stats and the journal

The Stats page has two views, switched beside its title: Insights — how much of the period the screen was blocked, and when — and Activity, the journal: the append-only record of everything AtControl did. The period switch (Day · Week · Month · Year · All time) belongs to both, and ‹ › beside it step to the previous or next day, week, month or year — back as far as the first thing recorded, forward as far as today. Away from the present, a link (This week, Today…) goes straight back.

Activity — the journal

A one-line summary of the period sits on top (“This week · 11h 42m blocked · 23 sessions”). Below it, one row per event, newest first, with a time, an icon, a title, a tag (USER, AGENT, SYSTEM, TRACKER; a row an iPhone caused also wears PHONE), and, for sessions, the span and its duration (“14:02 → 14:26 · 24m”, or “→ now · RUNNING”). Filter chips by source; a search field over titles and details.

The events:

Each carries where it came from (menu bar, main window, Shortcuts, URL, phone, settings, system) — recorded and exported, not shown in the row.

Clicking a session, a day or a month in Insights opens Activity showing only the events from it; a banner names the range, and Show all lets go.

Insights

Key numbers for the period:

• Screen blocked — total time, with a sparkline and a “vs last week” comparison;
• Sessions, Remote sessions, and the Longest session with its day and feature;
• a split bar by feature — Standard (manual), Timer, Agent — with the legend naming every slice, because green and amber are close for some eyes.

A chart that follows the period:

• Day and Week — one 24-hour track per day, each session drawn at its real times (a day older than the journal’s details is drawn from its hourly totals: the right amount in each hour, not the exact times);
• Month — a calendar, each day shaded by how much of it was blocked, with its split;
• Year — a bar per month; All time — a bar per month for up to a year of history, per quarter up to three years, per year beyond. Clicking a year opens its quarters, a quarter its months.

Hover anything for its exact figures in the line above the chart; click it to see its events in Activity.

Your typical day (every period but Day): the average blocked time for each hour of a weekday or a weekend day, and the days of the week ranked by their average.

Overlapping reasons are counted once, against the most specific one — an agent over a timer, a timer over plain blocking. A running session is counted up to now and refreshed while the page is open.

The phone computes the same statistics itself from its mirror of the journal, so both agree.

Export

Stats ▸ Export…: CSV or JSON of the journal — machine-readable, not localised.

Retention

Statistics are kept for the life of the app. Every finished day is folded into one small summary row — about 150 KB a year, however busy the Mac — and the overview reads those rows, so Month, Year and All time reach back to the first day whatever happens to the journal.

Settings ▸ Activity:

• Recording on/off.
• Keep details for 30, 90 (the default) or 365 days, or forever: how long the individual journal entries are kept. Older entries are removed automatically; the statistics are not. The last month of entries is always kept.
• Clear: the last hour, the last day, or everything (asks first). Everything takes the statistics with it.

A refused agent command repeated word for word within five minutes is recorded once.

The journal is stored on the Mac and, unless you pair a phone, never transmitted. With a paired phone, events are mirrored to your private iCloud database; pruning on the Mac does not delete the iCloud copies (v1).