Track Your PC’s Active Timeline in A Day Via KeyCounter

If you want a simple tool which calculates work productivity level on the basis of total keystrokes and mouse movements, try KeyCounter. It is an application which not only counts keys used while working on some task but can be used to check how much you’ve been productive since any defined time. Contrasting to previously covered PAM (Personal Activity Monitor), it maintains history for all the days to check out overall productivity level of either one week or month. Since it’s a portable application, you can carry it on flash drive to keep track of time on all the systems that you use. Key Counter is totally distraction free tool, as when launched, It will minimize to system-tray, letting you view the amount of keystrokes in current session or check out the history. The main interface shows the graph for time against keyboard/mouse activity. To check the current session, select Today from its system-tray menu.

Notes:

Over every 24 hours the program is running, the graph will be automatically updated, once a minute. It details the number of keys pressed per minutes (in red), and whether the mouse was moved (in blue). The start and end times are also displayed.

A file will be written containing details of both of these, and will have a .key extension. These files can then be examined by chosing History from the task-tray menu. Click on any to view the data from that day. Weekends have a WE appended to the file name to help identify them.

The graph will automatically resize to reflect the maximum number of keypresses per minute.

The program will count keypresses made in any application, not characters typed, so if you start a new document in Word and type "Hello", that's six keypresses. Once for each of the letters, and one for the shift keypress needed to make the "H" capital!

KeyCounter provides a way of keeping track of when you've been active on your PC during the day. It does pretty much what it says - counts the number of key strokes you make every minute and records that information, along with whether the mouse has moved.

KeyCounter can then be used to browse the files, and display a graph of when you were at your most busy. It details the time of the first and last keypress in a day, and the graph clearly shows when you weren't at your machine - making the coffee or gone for lunch.

Keep KeyCounter running on your machine all the time, and then call up the history when you want to review your activity - when filling in your timesheet for example.

History feature comes handy in viewing the time you stayed productive since the first usage of KeyCounter. It lists down all the days at the left sidebar. Just select the day whose work timeline is to be reviewed. The application is small and light on system resources.

It works on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7.

Download KeyCounter