Phones have shipped with wellbeing tools for years: Digital Wellbeing on Android and Screen Time on iPhone. Many of us spend even more hours at a computer, yet Windows has no equivalent dashboard built in.
What "Digital Wellbeing" means
Digital Wellbeing is a set of tools that help you notice how you use a device and make small changes if you want to. On phones, that usually means:
- A dashboard of screen time and the apps you used most.
- App timers that limit how long you can use an app each day.
- Focus modes that pause distracting apps while you work.
- Wind-down features that make the screen calmer in the evening.
None of it forces you to change. It shows you the numbers and gives you a few gentle levers.
Why your PC needs it too
A computer is where work, study, news, games and chat all happen in one place, often for eight hours or more a day. That makes it easy to lose an hour without noticing, and hard to tell a productive day from a scattered one.
Windows has pieces of the puzzle, such as battery usage on laptops and Family Safety for children's accounts, but nothing that gives an adult a simple picture of their own day. We look at those in how to check your screen time on Windows 11.
How Pulse brings it to Windows
Pulse is a free, open-source app that brings the Android Digital Wellbeing experience to Windows 10 and 11:
- Screen time with today, weekly and past-week views.
- App usage ranked by time, with app switches and average focus.
- Focus sessions that warn you about distracting apps or minimize them.
- App limits with daily allowances and unavailable hours.
- Breaks and wind down, including 20-20-20 eye-break reminders.
- Hearing, which flags long listening above 75 dB without ever recording audio.
Private by design
A wellbeing tool sees a lot about your day, so where that data goes matters. Pulse keeps everything in a local database on your PC. There's no account, no cloud sync and no telemetry, and the whole app is open source so anyone can check.
Getting started
Download Pulse from GitHub or the Microsoft Store. It's free, installs without admin rights, and updates itself. Give it a week, then open the weekly report and see what your PC days actually look like.
Built into Pulse
Track screen time, focus and breaks on Windows. Free, open source, no account.