Written 27 October 2026. Product details describe RiD Flow as it stood at the time of writing.
There is a new way to answer the question “where did my day go?” Take a picture of the screen every few seconds, hand the pictures to an AI, and let it write the story of your day.
It works surprisingly well. I decided against building it anyway.
At the time of writing, RiD Flow records which program was in front, and when. That includes the window title — it is how the app can tell one document from another. There was no switch to turn titles off when I wrote this, and I’d rather say so here than have someone find it.
That’s all. No picture of what was on the screen, and nothing that reads the screen for you.
Three reasons, in order of how much they mattered to me.
A screenshot captures everything that happened to be visible. The message you were reading, the document someone shared, the bank page in the other window. A record of which program was open is narrow by design. A picture of the screen is broad by design, and then you need a second system to decide what to forget.
An interpretation is a guess with good manners. When software reads your screen and writes “worked on the quarterly report”, it sounds certain. Sometimes it is right. When it is wrong, the mistake looks exactly like the truth. I removed a feature from Flow earlier this year because it made the data look better than it was. A summary that fills every gap with a plausible sentence is the same problem, only more convincing.
Some hours should stay unexplained. If nothing on the computer explains forty minutes after lunch, I want the app to say exactly that — and let me name it afterwards if I want to. A walk, a phone call, a nap. An unexplained hour is information. An invented one isn’t.
It is a real trade-off. A screenshot-based tool can tell you what you did in a document. Flow can only tell you that you were in it, for how long, and how often you switched away. The rest is yours to add — or to leave blank.
For me, that’s the point. A tracker should know less than you do, and admit it.
RiD Flow is a time tracker for Windows 11, in development. Join the waitlist to hear when it is ready.