PFH

Profiling, for Humans

"In God we trust, all others must bring Data"
- W. Edwards Deming

Premise

We are all aware of what Socrates has to say on the subject of unexamined lives.

Many of us spend a significant chunk of our work-lives on Computers, and yet the tools we use to examine the quality of our screen-time are woefully subjective - at best. Here, we present a simple attempt at correcting that shortfall.

PFH - Profiling for Humans (on Computers): A tool to collate data and present insights about how you spend your screen-time everyday.

Exempli Gratia, Data that looks like this:

PFH presents this data based on what Applications you use throughout the day.

This is not meant to monitor you. This is a Tool to help us be more cognizant of our time. And of course, your data will not leave your computer.

Installation

At present PFH supports MacOS only. If you would like to use it on Windows or Linux, please express your interest here.

PFH needs two pieces of Software to work. A daemon that runs in your Task Bar, and a small server that parses the data collated by the daemon. Please follow the steps below to install those two pieces (you'll only need to do this once)

Installing the Task Bar App:

Download the DMG of the Task Bar App here and install it as you would any Mac application:

⬇ DOWNLOAD ⬇

Run the App by either double-clicking on pfh_daemon in your Applications folder or simply pull up spotlight and type in pfh_daemon

Depending on your MacOS version you might be presented with some variant of the permissions dialog. Please accept - these permissions are necessary for pfh_daemon to operate (see here for more information)
Additionally, on Mojave and Catalina, accepting the permissions will bring up the System Preferences window (shown below) with the checkbox unchecked. Please check it.

At this point you will see PFH-daemon running as a little green icon (shown below) in your Task Bar. And it will start itself whenever your computer starts.

Installing the Server

You'll need Docker to run the server. Please follow the instruction here to install Docker:

Install Docker Desktop for Mac ➦

Now, open up a Terminal and run the following command:

docker run --restart always -d -e "TZ=Asia/Kolkata" -v $HOME/Library/Containers/com.spacetimi.pfh-daemon/Data/Documents:/root/Library/Containers/com.spacetimi.pfh-daemon/Data/Documents --publish 9001:9001 spacetimi/pfh-reader:release-1.0 | xargs -I containerId docker logs -f containerId

(Note: You may have to change the TZ(time-zone) in the command above)

This will take a couple minutes to download the server-image after which you should see:

Server started successfully|port=9001

That's it. You can close the Terminal and go about your day. The server will start itself every time your computer starts.

Usage

Whenever you're ready to view your data, simply go to http://localhost:9001 in your browser. And you should see something like this:

Check back on your data at the end of the day -or as often as you'd like- to see how you're doing. Happy Profiling!

Customization

PFH has a very basic understanding / opinion of what constitutes productive work. It does not really understand your particular workflow.

But you can teach it. Simply go to the Settings tab and add/remove rules based on what applications are considered Productive for you.

The rules are simple string-matches based on either the Application's name or the Application's Title Bar contents. And you don't have to get all your rules in at the beginning. You can add/remove rules over time - every time you modify the rules your data is reevaluated to better reflect what the new rules say.

You're all set!

If you have any questions check out the FAQ.

PFH is an open-source project. If you'd like to contribute, or if you'd like to know more about how any of this works, please see the Technology section.

If you find this Tool useful and would like to offer feedback or simply send me a cheers, feel free to do so.

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