what did i work on last week? how to rebuild it for a timesheet

as of october 2026, the honest way to answer what did i work on last week is to rebuild it from traces your mac and tools already keep: screen time hours per app, if it was turned on, plus dated browser history, git log and slack search. none of them say what you did inside an app, so you still connect the dots yourself.

download remynd for mac if you would rather search last week than reconstruct it.

why can't you remember what you worked on last week?

in our experience a week is not one block of work. it is many small switches, and memory keeps the big ones.

microsoft's june 17, 2025 work trend index report puts numbers on it. for the busiest fifth of users, a meeting, email or chat lands every two minutes during core hours. the same report found 57% of meetings are ad hoc calls with no calendar invite, so your calendar misses a lot of them.

the survey half of the report points the same way. microsoft surveyed 31,000 knowledge workers across 31 markets between february 6, 2025 and march 24, 2025, and 48% of employees and 52% of leaders said their work feels chaotic and fragmented. we think a fragmented week is hard to recall in order.

that is why, in our experience, when you fill out a timesheet on friday afternoon it is mostly a guess. we see people fill the gaps with whatever sounds reasonable, and the record ends up describing the week they planned, not the week they had.

which traces does your mac already keep?

most tools you used last week left a dated trail, whether it came from apple, google, git or slack, and each covers a different slice. this table is the order we would check them in.

we checked the screen time, browser, git and slack steps against each vendor's own docs on october 18, 2026. the calendar row rests on the microsoft figure above. in our view the pattern is the same in every row: each trace is precise about when, and vague about what.

how do i check screen time for last week on a mac?

screen time on mac is usually the quickest way to get hours, in our experience, because apple already sorts your time by app. apple's screen time guide gives the path:

1. open system settings and click screen time in the sidebar.
2. click app & website activity.
3. use the left arrow to pick a date in last week, then open the date menu and choose last week.
4. choose show apps to see each app's total, or pick a single day to see that day.

one catch. apple's usage guide says you cannot see the reports until you turn screen time on. if it was off last week, there is nothing to look back at.

how do i pull last week out of git, slack and my browser?

each of these takes a date filter, which is the whole trick. ask for one week, not for everything.

• git log. the git docs list --since and --until for dates and --author for you. run git log --since="2 weeks ago" --until="1 week ago" --author=you --oneline in each repo you touched, the same date style the docs use in their own example. that is a rolling week ending today, so for a monday to sunday timesheet, swap in that week's dates.
• slack search. slack's search help supports from: with a person and on:, before: or after: with a date. search from:@you on: plus each day to see what you said.
• chrome history. google's chrome help has you open google chrome, click the more menu at the top right, then history. scroll to the day. the window it keeps is in the table above.
• safari history. in apple's safari guide, you choose history, then show all history, and type in the search field.

write each finding next to the day it happened. by the end you have a rough log, which in our experience is more than most timesheets start with.

should you just estimate your timesheet?

for internal tracking, a rough estimate is usually fine. for billed client time, we think it is not, and that is our judgement rather than a rule.

our worry with estimating is that, in our experience, it drifts toward round numbers and toward whatever the project budget expected. if a client ever asks why a task took a full day, "it felt like a day" is a weak answer. a dated commit and a slack thread from that afternoon are a much better one.

if you bill hours, our longer guide on billable hours reconstruction covers the client side. if what you owe is a summary rather than hours, how to write your weekly update has a template.

what are the honest limits of rebuilding a week?

in our experience rebuilding a week from traces is slow and leaves holes. it is worth knowing where they are before you trust the result.

• calls leave little behind. a call with no invite has no trace in your calendar, and what was said is gone unless someone recorded it.
• app time is not task time. two hours in your browser could be research or could be a long news detour. screen time cannot tell them apart.
• reading leaves little behind. the doc you read for an hour, the dashboard you checked, the pdf a client sent. history may hold the url, not what you learned.
• it only works forward. screen time has to be on, and logs have to be kept, before the week you want to look back on.

if the question is less "how many hours" and more "where did i see that", our guide to which app you saw it in works through that by app.

where does remynd fit?

remynd helps with the "what did i do inside the app" gap that the table leaves open. it captures the focused window, runs ocr locally with apple vision, and keeps the searchable index on your mac. recordings are kept for 30 days by default, and you can exclude apps and sites you never want captured.

remynd also has a journal, in early access for now. it writes each day down as chapters: what you worked on, who you talked to, the projects that came up and the loops you left open. click a moment and you are back on that point on your screen. people who use remynd can ask to be added to early access.

for the wider picture of how this category works, start with what screen memory is.

download remynd for mac and fill in next week's timesheet from what you actually did.