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The time instrument

The time tracker that flies back.

flyback is a time tracker built around one honest loop: press start, live your day, log it in one motion — and the timer restarts instantly, like the chronograph complication it's named after.

★★★★★ Loved by people who keep whole days, not just billable hours
No credit card · Your data never leaves your device
— workspace: personal live demo — try me
00:00:00
▶ Press START, let it run a few seconds, then hit LOG & FLY BACK — your entry drops into Today and the timer restarts by itself. That's the flyback.
TodayTotal: 0:00
100%
local & private
1-tap
log & restart
2
watch faces
9
life categories
Features

Everything a timekeeper needs. Nothing it doesn't.

Most trackers are timesheets with a stopwatch bolted on. flyback is built around one honest loop: run, stop, log, fly back.

Flyback timer

Log an activity and the next session starts instantly — no dead air between what you did and what you're doing next.

Gentle check-ins

Every 10–90 minutes flyback asks, "still on this?" Drift gets caught early, and honest hours stay honest.

Two watch faces

Inside the app: a hand-drawn mechanical chronograph dial, or a faithful retro digital face — with the sounds to match.

Days & weekly reports

Stacked day cards, a 7-day chart, a time scorecard donut, and a "time wallet" showing where your hours actually went.

Manual log & editing

Forgot to track? Backfill any day with smart auto-continuing start times. Edit or delete any entry, any time.

Your data, portable

Export any range as CSV or a .flyback file, merge across devices, and enjoy 10-minute autosave with crash recovery.

How it works

One motion, like the complication.

On a flyback chronograph, a single press resets the hand and restarts it mid-flight. That's the whole philosophy.

1

Press start

One button. Go live your day — flyback keeps count, even through reloads and closed tabs.

2

Stop & name it

When you switch contexts, write one line — what were you just doing? — and tag it to one of nine life categories.

3

It flies back

The moment you log, the timer resets and restarts automatically. Your day becomes one unbroken record — no gaps, no guilt.

The story

A tracker for you. Not your timesheet.

Nearly every time tracker ever built answers to someone else. Hours are logged so a client can be billed, a manager reassured, a payroll run closed. The person doing the living is the last one the record serves.

flyback started from the opposite question: what would a time tracker look like if it existed only for you? Not to prove productivity to anyone — but to give you back an honest picture of your own days. Where the deep work actually happened. How long the walk really was. What the evening quietly dissolved into.

The answer came from an unlikely place: the wrist of a 1930s pilot. The flyback chronograph was invented for people who needed to time life as it happened — leg after leg of a flight, with no seconds lost to fumbling. One press, and the hand flies back and keeps running. We took that idea and built a whole philosophy of tracking around it: your day recorded as one continuous sweep, not a scatter of billable fragments.

Because time is the one resource you can't buy more of, borrow, or earn back. Awareness of where it goes isn't productivity theatre — it's the closest thing to owning your life. Work sits next to health, the dog, the kitchen, the people you love. All of it counts, because all of it is your time.

"This isn't a tracker to satisfy your employer or your client. It's an instrument for people who want to see their own time clearly."

— the flyback workshop
Whole days, not billables. Nine life categories — work is just one of them.
Yours alone. Local-first by design; the record lives on your device, for your eyes.
Awareness over surveillance. Gentle check-ins ask what's true — nothing watches over your shoulder.
Heritage

Born in the cockpit.

The flyback — retour en vol, "return in flight" — is one of horology's great complications, invented for people who couldn't afford to lose a second between measurements.

1920s–30s

The pilot's problem

Aviators navigated by dead reckoning — timing each leg of a flight precisely. A conventional chronograph demanded three presses between legs: stop, reset, restart. Gloved hands, cold cockpits, seconds lost every time.

1936

Longines patents the flyback

With the legendary calibre 13ZN, Longines patented a mechanism where one press snaps the chronograph hand back to zero and releases it instantly — timing the next leg without ever stopping.

1940s–50s

Standard issue in the air

Flyback chronographs from Hanhart, Breguet (Type 20) and others became standard military pilot's equipment — instruments trusted when timing was navigation, and navigation was survival.

2026

flyback.io

We brought the complication to time tracking. The same single-press "return in flight" — applied not to flight legs, but to the hours of your life.

Why it matters

Three ways a flyback beats a conventional timer.

1

No lost time between sessions

Conventional: stop → save → reset → start. Every switch leaks minutes, and the untracked gaps pile up until your "day" is six hours long.
Flyback: logging an entry is starting the next one — a single motion. The record is continuous, so your tracked day adds up to your actual day. The gaps were the truth you were missing.
2

You log what happened, not what you planned

Conventional: declare a task up front, then start the clock. The label is a prediction — and predictions flatter us.
Flyback: you name the session after living it — "what were you just doing?" Retrospective logging is honest by construction: it records the afternoon you had, not the one you intended.
3

It captures the switches themselves

Conventional: measures isolated task durations and hides the transitions — the most revealing data a day contains.
Flyback: every log marks a context switch, so the rhythm of your day becomes visible: how often you change tracks, when focus fragments, where the drift lives. Awareness starts at the switches.
Case studies

Three days, kept.

Awareness, productivity, enjoyment — the same instrument, three very different wrists.

Awareness · Mary, freelance illustrator

She thought the work ate her mornings. It was the scroll.

Mary was sure client work devoured her days — until two weeks of flyback showed the truth in the time wallet: ninety scattered minutes of phone before noon, logged honestly because logging took one press. She didn't need more discipline. She needed to see it. Her mornings now open with a tracked walk and one unbroken Health hour before the first email — and the gentle check-in catches the scroll before it swallows the hour.

☀ 6 hours of mornings reclaimed each week · Early Bird badge, day four
Productivity · Simon, backend engineer

His timer never showed the problem. His switches did.

Simon had tracked time for years and learned nothing — totals looked fine. flyback measures what conventional timers hide: the transitions. His log showed fourteen context switches before lunch, each one a press of LOG & FLY BACK he hadn't thought about. Once the switches were visible, they became deliberate. He batches the small stuff now, guards two Marathon blocks a day, and lets the week chart referee.

⇄ 14 → 5 context switches a morning · deep-work doubled in three weeks
Enjoyment · Illiya, product designer & dog person

He tracks evenings the way others track billables.

For Illiya, flyback was never about squeezing in more work — it was about proving to himself that life was happening. Dog walks, cooking experiments, chess with his dad: all logged, all counted. The achievements case turned it into a quiet game — he's chasing a 30-day streak, collects Balanced Days like stamps, and earned Night Watch on a midnight ramen session. His week wallet finally shows a life, not a job.

◎ 21-day streak · Balanced Day × 12 · Collector badge unlocked
On your wrist… almost

flyback on iPhone.

flyback is a lightweight web app — it installs from Safari in three taps and runs fullscreen like a native app, icon and all. Your record lives on the phone; with Chronometer it stays live with your desktop, to the second.

1

Open flyback in Safari

On your iPhone, visit this site and log in — your account, skins and plan come with you.

2

Share → Add to Home Screen

Tap the share button, choose "Add to Home Screen." The yellow dial lands next to your other apps.

3

Track like it's native

Fullscreen, offline-ready, one tap from the home screen. Start on the phone — watch it running on your laptop.

⌚ App Store version — coming soon, built on the same movement
From the workshop — on YouTube

Brief Stories of Time

Beautifully illustrated shorts on how the world's best use timing as an instrument — the rituals, tools and seconds behind elite performance. Tools of Titans, but for time.

EP·01 — 4:20 0:20
BRIEF STORY Nº1

Federer's twenty seconds

Between points, the best returner of serve in history ran a fixed ritual — gaze on the strings, breath down, next point scripted. What happens when you own the seconds nobody counts?

EP·02 — 5:05
BRIEF STORY Nº2

The bezel that brings you back

Before dive computers, a rotating ring of sixty minutes stood between a diver and the surface. How the humblest complication ever made kept thousands of people alive — and still does.

EP·03 — 4:45
BRIEF STORY Nº3

Thirty seconds before takeoff

The pre-flight checklist was born from a 1935 crash and takes less than a minute to run. Why the most time-pressed professionals on earth never skip it — and what your mornings can steal from the flight deck.

New brief story every other Sunday · illustrated by the flyback workshop
Pricing

Own your time. Pick your caliber.

Tracking is free forever — a good instrument shouldn't rent you your own hours. Paid tiers fund sync, deeper reports, and the workshop.

Field
The everyday watch
$0
free forever
  • Unlimited time tracking & sessions
  • Flyback loop + drift check-ins
  • One device — full record, forever
  • Flieger & Terminal watch faces
  • Day, week & scorecard reports
  • Offline handoff codes, CSV / .flyback export
Atelier
For small teams & studios
$10 / seat / mo
billed annually · min 2 seats
  • Everything in Chronometer
  • Shared workspaces & team reports
  • Billable rates & client invoicing
  • API access & integrations
  • Concierge onboarding
Testimonials

Kept by people who keep time.

★★★★★

"The flyback loop changed how I work. Logging isn't a chore at the end of the day — it's a single press between tasks."

M. Laurent — Independent designer
★★★★★

"The check-ins are quietly brilliant. It caught two hours of 'research' that was actually just my phone."

J. Okafor — PhD candidate
★★★★★

"It's the only tracker I've kept using, because it's the only one I actually want to look at."

A. Weiss — Watch collector, consultant
FAQ

Questions, answered.

Where is my data stored?

Entirely on your device, in your browser's local storage — nothing is sent to a server. Autosave keeps a rolling backup every 10 minutes, and you can export a .flyback file any time to move or archive your record. Cloud sync arrives with the Chronometer plan.

Why is it called flyback?

A flyback chronograph lets you reset and restart timing with a single press, without stopping first — patented by Longines in 1936 for pilots timing flight legs. flyback the app works the same way: log an entry and the next session starts instantly, so your day is recorded as one continuous sweep. Read the full story in the Heritage section above.

Is the free plan really free forever?

Yes. All core tracking — the timer, check-ins, both watch faces, reports, manual logging, and export — is free with no limits. Paid tiers add convenience (sync, longer-horizon reports, teams), never basic timekeeping.

Can I use it on multiple devices?

Field (free) gives you the complete tracker on one device, with offline handoff codes and .flyback export when you switch machines. Live multi-device sync is the Chronometer feature: log in anywhere and every device shares one record in real time — start a timer on your phone and it's visibly running on your laptop within a second, analytics and badges included.

Can I put flyback on my iPhone?

Yes. flyback is a lightweight web app: host the file anywhere (or open it from iCloud), tap Share → Add to Home Screen in Safari, and it runs fullscreen like a native app — icon, splash and all. Your record stays on the phone, and handoff codes move sessions between phone and desktop.

What are the nine categories?

Work, Health, Life, Social, Leisure, Dog, Cooking, Chores, and Other — a taxonomy for whole days, not just billable hours. Custom categories are coming to Chronometer.

Begin the record

Your time is the whole fortune. Start counting it.

Free forever plan·No credit card·Local-first & private
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Wind the crown. Your record is waiting.
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