I Built a Tool to Track My Attention. My Browser Was Already Doing It Better.

I've been building a small daily ritual: a 1:3:5 benchmark that scores how consciously I use my tools. One anchor, three core, five supporting, then a read on how much cognitive load my stack is quietly charging me.

To run it, I opened Dia, the browser assistant, and asked a simple question: what did yesterday actually look like? I expected a rough outline so I could score the stack. What came back was a higher-resolution map than the ritual itself.

Not just a list of sites. A ledger. Grok: two hours fifty-one minutes of focused attention, in a single unbroken thread. My marketing tool: sixty-four minutes and 4,607 keystrokes. My writing app: 2,728 keystrokes. Per surface. To the minute. To the keypress.

I didn't ask it to count my keystrokes. It already had.

I went and read what Dia actually publishes about this. The data is stored locally on my device. There's a seven-day window. There's an opt-out. Sensitive pages get filtered before they're ever stored. Incognito is never saved. By the standards of the modern web, that's more restraint than most.

But go looking for where they tell you what they measure, and the language goes soft. Memory "remembers the pages you visited and conversations you've had." Focus shows up only as a refresh schedule, how often it re-reads a tab. Nowhere does it say, in plain words: we record how long you hold your attention on each surface, and how many keys you press while you're there.

That's the gap. Not between local and cloud. Between what the tool knows about me and what it says it knows.

And it matters, because attention at that resolution isn't trivia. It's the most honest map of a person that exists. Where your minutes and your keystrokes land is your priorities, stripped of what you'd claim about yourself. A list of URLs is a phone book. Focused-time-plus-keystrokes is a confession.

Which brings me to the word "free." I don't know what Dia's telemetry funds. But free is never free; it's a bill you haven't been shown. Sometimes you pay in money. Sometimes in ads. Sometimes in a fidelity of self-knowledge you handed over without quite reading the resolution on the receipt. The right response isn't outrage. It's the same question I ask of every tool in my stack: what does it know about me, and did it tell me plainly?

Design your stack before someone else's defaults design it for you. That includes the one you're reading this in.

Siosi teaches pattern recognition for the digital world, helping conscious leaders stay sovereign through tech waves.

If this named the load on your stack, start with a structured read: Pattern Scan.