NEW v0.4 is out — offline sync included

Know where your
attention actually goes

Lumen is a quiet focus companion for your desktop. It watches how your day really unfolds, then hands you an honest summary — no streaks, no guilt, no data leaving your machine.

Download for free Star on GitHub

Product screenshot goes here assets/img/lumen-dashboard.png

The problem

You finished the day busy. Were you productive?

Most people genuinely cannot answer that, and the tools meant to help mostly add another thing to manage. Timers need starting. Task apps need grooming. Analytics dashboards optimize for looking impressive, not for being true.

⏳

Manual timers get forgotten

Any tool that depends on you remembering to press start is measuring your memory, not your work.

📉

Streaks make you lie

Gamified apps reward the appearance of consistency. You end up optimizing the metric instead of the outcome.

🔒

Your day isn't their data

Most trackers ship a minute-by-minute log of your life to someone else's server. That should not be the default.

What it does

Small tool, sharp opinions

🌗

Passive tracking

Lumen notices which app and project you're in and stitches it into sessions automatically. Nothing to start, nothing to stop, nothing to remember.

🧭

Honest daily review

One screen at the end of the day: deep work, shallow work, and the context switches that ate the gaps. Uncomfortable the first week, useful forever after.

🏝️

Local-first, always

Everything lives in a SQLite file on your disk. No account, no telemetry, no network calls unless you explicitly turn on sync.

🔌

Plain-text export

One command dumps your history to CSV or JSON. Your data stays yours, and leaving is as easy as arriving.

⚡

Genuinely lightweight

A Rust core in a Tauri shell: about 12 MB installed and under 1% CPU while idle. It disappears into the background where it belongs.

🧩

Scriptable

A small local HTTP API and a CLI, so you can pipe your focus data into whatever dashboard or journal you already keep.

How it works

Three steps, then forget it exists

The whole design goal is that you interact with Lumen twice a day at most: once when you install it, once when you read the summary.

Read the docs

  1. Install

    One binary for macOS, Windows and Linux. No runtime to set up, no account to create.

  2. Work as usual

    Lumen sits in the menu bar and records sessions locally while you get on with your day.

  3. Read your review

    At a time you choose, a single quiet notification opens the day's summary. That's the entire loop.

# install and start tracking
brew install lumen
lumen start

# export everything, any time
lumen export --since "30d" --format csv

Under the hood

Built deliberately small

Every dependency has to earn its place. Here's what made the cut and why.

Rust

The tracking core. Predictable memory, no GC pauses, negligible idle cost.

Tauri

Native shell without shipping a browser. A tenth of the install size of the Electron version.

React + TS

The review UI. Typed end to end against the Rust API via generated bindings.

SQLite

One file, on your disk, readable by any tool you already own.

12 MB Installed size
<1% Idle CPU
0 Network calls by default
MIT Licensed, fully open

Roadmap

What's next

  1. End-to-end encrypted sync

    In progress

    Optional multi-device sync where the server holds ciphertext and nothing else.

  2. Weekly retrospectives

    Next

    Trends across weeks, so you can see whether a change to your routine actually did anything.

  3. Editor & calendar plugins

    Exploring

    Richer context from the tools you already live in, without extra bookkeeping.

Try it this week

Free, open source, and it takes about a minute to install. If it doesn't earn its place in five days, delete it — one file and it's gone.

Get Lumen Send feedback