Screen Time

Connect

Press “connect” on the Screen Time card. The panel opens in the Knowledge folder where macOS keeps Screen Time, ~/Library/Application Support/Knowledge: press “Select this folder”. Then press “select export folder”.

Where the files go

One Markdown file per day, named by its date (2026-09-01.md), and a summary.md beside them. A folder right in your home folder, like ~/Documents, gets a screen-time-export folder inside it; a deeper one, like ~/Documents/screen-time, is used as it is.

What is exported

The days ticked on the card. The tabs only sort the list: Days (every day, newest first), Recent (the last seven days) and Busiest (the most screen time).

macOS keeps about four weeks of Screen Time. Exporter never deletes a day file, so the export keeps growing past that, and the folder is the only copy of the older days. Days macOS deleted before you exported them cannot be exported.

A day file has four sections: App Usage (every app used for a minute or more, with its time and sessions), Web Usage (time and visits per domain), Notifications (a count per app) and Screen Sessions (when the screen came on and went off, and the total). summary.md holds Top Apps and Daily Totals over the days the latest sync read, about the last four weeks.

Format

Always Markdown: tables, with the day’s totals in the front matter.

The file

key	holds
title	Screen Time and the date
id, created, modified	the date
tags	screen-time
total_screen_time	the day’s total, like 3h 51m
apps_used, domains_visited	how many apps and websites

---
title: "Screen Time 2026-09-01"
id: "2026-09-01"
created: 2026-09-01T00:00:00
modified: 2026-09-01T00:00:00
tags:
  - "screen-time"
total_screen_time: "3h 51m"
apps_used: 4
domains_visited: 2
---

## App Usage

| App | Duration | Sessions |
|-----|----------|----------|
| Xcode | 2h 4m | 6 |
| Safari | 1h 21m | 11 |

Free and unlocked

The 10 newest days you had ticked at your first sync are the free days, and they stay the free ten: later days need the one-time unlock (pricing). To choose other free days, untick before that first sync.

Sync and full resync

After the first “sync now”, Exporter adds new days while it runs, at most once a minute.

“full resync” asks first, then removes the files Exporter wrote, every day file included, and exports again what macOS still has. The days macOS already deleted do not come back: back up the folder before you ever press it.

Problems and fixes

• “no knowledgeC.db in that folder (pick the Knowledge folder itself)”: press “connect” again and select the folder the panel opens in
• new days stop arriving: the free ten are used. Unlock Screen Time and press “sync now”
• a day is missing from the start: macOS had already deleted it
• summary.md covers only recent weeks: it adds up the days the latest sync read; the day files keep the rest