Rueckblick

About Rueckblick

While moving house I found an old letter. I had written it to myself at university — one of those exercises where you seal it and open it two weeks later — and I was reading it about seven years late, on a day when the master's was finished and five years of work were behind me. What got me was not how much had changed. It was how small the worries had been, how simple that life was next to this one, and how plainly the letter showed me how far I had come.

I wanted to keep that kind of record on purpose rather than by accident. But I am not someone who writes a page every evening, and I am a data analyst: I want the numbers next to the words. So Rueckblick does both — it measures the day, and then it asks you about it.

It notes which app is in front while the screen is on, lets you sort those apps into categories you name yourself, each carrying a rating from deep work to time sink, and then asks you, once an evening, to close the day out loud.

Screen-time apps usually stop at the first half of that. A number is not an insight. The review is.

THE DAY

• Today: a 24-hour bar of your day, stacked by how the time was rated, with per-app totals underneath.
• Trends: the same reading across a week or a month, so a bad Tuesday stays a Tuesday and not a verdict.
• Categories: your taxonomy, not a fixed list. Categories carry the rating; subcategories inherit or override it. A single session can be re-rated afterwards, and rating one *upwards* asks you to say why.

THE EVENING

The Rueckblick is one standardized document per day, in three parts: the numbers, the questions, the summary. You can dictate it or type it. Speech recognition runs on the device, and the audio is never written down. The questions are a template you can rewrite, reorder or extend. One of them writes tomorrow's task list, which Today ticks off one item at a time. Nothing carries over to the day after; this is a journal, not a backlog.

WHAT IT WILL NOT DO

• No account, no server, no sync. Nothing is uploaded.
• No ads, no trackers, no analytics.
• Attribution is at app level only. Rueckblick sees which app is open, never anything inside it.
• AI is optional and off. If you point it at an endpoint of your own (a model on your phone, your own server, or a provider you choose), it can suggest which questions your monologue already answered and write the summary. Suggestions only: nothing is ever written into your journal on a model's say-so, and the key you give it is encrypted on the device and never leaves it.
• Recorded time is yours. Write a backup to a file you choose, whenever you want one.

Free software, GPL-3.0-or-later. Source and issues: https://github.com/rueckblick/rueckblick-android-kotlin