A time-and-motion study for your computer

Efficiency had a stopwatch. Then a camera. This time, you study yourself.

A century ago, Frank and Lillian Gilbreth filmed people at work, found the wasted motions, and made jobs faster and less exhausting. Gilbreth brings their method to your computer, and keeps every byte of what it sees on your machine.

Frank Gilbreth observing a worker at a factory machine, photographed during a motion study.

How it works

Study the motions. Remove the friction.

01

Use

App captures actions locally

02

Inspect

Visualize your real workday

03

Find

The wasted motions, surfaced

04

Plan

Develop personal automation

Use

A small, quiet app records your computer's elemental motions: app switches, windows opening and closing, keystrokes, clicks, idle time, every motion. Full fidelity, motion by motion, stored in a single local database on your machine.

Inspect

A dashboard turns the record into a picture of your actual workday: where your time pooled, what you switched to, which apps always travel together.

Find

Sift the record for repeated rituals and friction to discover the digital wasted motions. First with honest heuristics, then with AI trained on a record actually worth analyzing (see where we are, below).

Plan

Findings become specific suggestions, like an app that does your ritual in one step, a custom AI tool shaped to your exact workflow, or an integration that makes two stubborn apps finally talk.
These are your motions, your fixes.

Why it matters

Your work has its own wasted motions.
You've just never seen them.

A century after the Gilbreths, work moved onto screens, and went invisible again. No film to study or hands to watch.

The software that claims to help mostly brought back the stopwatch: hours-in-app charts and screen-time guilt. Its darker cousin, bossware, turned motion study into something done to workers, for someone else's benefit.

Gilbreth is the other tradition, offering efficiency that serves the worker. It's the camera, handed back to the person doing the work.

Gilbreth micromotion film still: a typist at her machine with the Gilbreth microchronometer clock in frame.

Privacy

Watched by no one. Studied by you.

A motion study only works if it captures everything (yes, that includes keystrokes).
What makes it safe is the architecture, not a promise:

Local only, by design

Everything lives in one database file on your machine. The app contains no network code. There is no server to send your data to, no telemetry, no cloud. It can't phone home because there's no phone.

You hold every switch

Pause or disable any capture stream, at any time, from the tray. Turn the keyboard stream off before a sensitive session and it stays off until you flip it back.

You can see and destroy everything

Inspect every recorded row. Delete any of it. Or erase it all, securely, in one action. Old history can prune itself on a retention schedule you set, and erasing means a true secure wipe, not a soft delete.

Following Lillian Gilbreth's ethic: the study exists for the person being studied. Nobody else.

Where we are

Building in the open

Gilbreth is being built in public, for Windows first. The capture-to-storage spine is working end to end. AI-driven recommendations come after that, once we can build on a foundation of data that's worth analyzing.

Join the waitlist and we'll write when it's ready to study you — or watch every commit on GitHub.

One email when it's ready. No spam, no tracking, plain unsubscribe.

The story

The Gilbreth story:
Finding the one best way

In 1885, a young bricklayer named Frank Gilbreth noticed something strange: no two masons laid brick the same way, and none of them could say why they moved the way they did.

So he started watching. Then filming. Frank and his wife Lillian, one of the first industrial psychologists (later called the First Lady of Engineering), broke work down into its elemental motions: search, find, grasp, position, rest, plan. They called these units therbligs (their name spelt backwards, roughly). They strapped small lights to workers' hands, photographed long exposures, turned invisible habits into visible ribbons of light, and called it the chronocyclegraph. For the first time, anyone could see wasted motion.

The results were stunning. Bricklaying went from eighteen motions per brick to about four and a half. Output nearly tripled — and the masons went home less tired.

That last part matters. While Frederick Taylor stood over workers with a stopwatch demanding speed, the Gilbreths removed the motions that wasted effort. Lillian's rule was non-negotiable: efficiency serves the worker, never the other way around.

(You may already know this family — two of their twelve kids wrote Cheaper by the Dozen about growing up inside the experiment.)

Portraits of Lillian and Frank Gilbreth. A Gilbreth chronocyclegraph photograph: ribbons of light tracing a worker's hand motions beside the Gilbreth timing clock.

FAQ

Is this a time tracker?
No — time trackers are stopwatches. They tell you how long. Gilbreth is more like a camera: it shows you which motions you do the most, so the waste can actually be removed.
Is this spyware / bossware?
It's the opposite, by architecture. Bossware sends your activity to someone else; Gilbreth has no network code at all. Your data never leaves your machine, and you're the only person who can see it.
It records keystrokes?
It can — a motion study with the keyboard missing isn't much of a study. Every stream is optional and can be toggled off at any time, the data stays local, and you can inspect or erase all of it.
When can I use it?
It's in active development, beginning with Windows, built in the open. The waitlist hears first; GitHub sees everything.

Find your one best way.

The Gilbreths proved a century ago that the kindest thing you can do for work is to see it clearly. It's your motion. Study it.

Join the waitlist