Recall your screen activity
Activity Journal keeps a private local history of what was on your screen, so you can ask questions such as "What was I working on five hours ago?" and get an answer based on recorded evidence rather than recollection. You can also turn on activity mapping, which summarizes your work activities and saves them to your Glean account.
At an interval you choose, Activity Journal captures one screenshot and one accessibility snapshot of the app you're using, and stores both on your computer. The extension is experimental and off by default. After you turn it on, capture stays paused until you enable it.
Activity Journal captures the app you're using at an interval you set, including apps other than Glean Tau. Turn it on only if that's what you intend, and follow your organization's policy on screen recording.
How it surfaces
Activity Journal doesn't have a panel. It has a dedicated settings page and gives the agent tools to search your history.
Manage it under Settings → Extensions → Activity Journal. To use it, ask in a chat to recall recent activity.
Understand what Activity Journal captures
Each sample captures the app you're using. If the app is in a window, Activity Journal captures that window. If the app is in full-screen mode, it captures the display the app is on.
Activity Journal skips some content before it captures anything:
- Password fields
- Keychain Access and 1Password
- The Windows credential prompt
- On Windows, windows that block screen capture
Capture pauses while your computer is locked or asleep, and Glean Tau doesn't capture while the app is closed.
Prerequisites
- macOS or Windows.
- On macOS, the Accessibility and Screen recording permissions. Windows doesn't need separate permissions.
- The extension turned on, and capture enabled.
Record and recall activity
Turn on the extension
Turn on Settings → Extensions → Activity Journal. Turning on the extension doesn't start capture.
Grant permissions
On macOS, go to the Permissions section of the Activity Journal settings page and select Enable next to Accessibility and Screen recording. If you previously denied Accessibility, the button is Manage instead, which opens System Settings so you can allow it.
Enable capture
Under Capture settings, select Enable capture. Glean Tau asks Enable activity mapping? Select Start capture only to record without mapping, or Enable mapping to turn on both. The status changes from Paused to Recording. To stop, select Disable capture.
Ask about earlier work
In a chat, ask what you were doing at a time or about a subject. Glean Tau searches the timeline by time or text and can open a specific snapshot.
By default, Activity Journal takes one sample every 20 seconds. To change it, enter a number of seconds in Capture interval, from 5 to 3,600 (1 hour).
The settings page has these sections:
| Section | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Permissions | macOS only. The status of the Accessibility and Screen recording permissions, with Enable and Manage to grant them |
| Capture settings | Whether capture is Paused or Recording, Enable capture or Disable capture, and Capture interval |
| Activity mapping | Whether mapping is on, Enable mapping or Disable mapping, Last run status, and Open activities folder. See Share mapped activities with Glean. |
| Storage and retention | How much space the journal uses. Open location opens the folder where Activity Journal stores its data, and Clear local journal permanently deletes local screenshots, accessibility text, the latest local mapping export, and journal entries after you confirm with Delete local data. Activity Journal keeps entries for 7 days and caps the store at about 2 GB, then removes the oldest entries. |
| Recent activity | Your latest samples as thumbnails. Select a thumbnail to see a larger preview. |
Share mapped activities with Glean
Activity mapping turns your recorded screen activity into a list of work activities, such as reviewing a document or updating a ticket, and saves them to your Glean account. Glean uses these activities as signals about how work gets done. Activity mapping is off by default, and you have to turn it on.
When activity mapping is on, Glean Tau runs it in the background once an hour:
- Groups your recent work activity. The first run looks back up to 3 days. Later runs start where the last successful run ended.
- Infers the activity. For each group, a model writes a short activity label and description.
- Saves the activities to Glean. Glean Tau uploads the activity records to your Glean account. After a successful upload, it deletes the screenshots it processed from your computer, and keeps the accessibility text and journal entries. If Glean Tau can't upload because you're offline, it deletes the screenshots after 7 days.
Background activity mapping sends screenshots and accessibility text to the model only after you turn it on. Separately, a chat that uses Activity Journal can send snapshots to its model even when mapping is off. See Limitations.
To turn on activity mapping, select Enable mapping when Glean Tau asks after you enable capture. If capture is already on, select Enable mapping in the Activity mapping section of the Activity Journal settings page. Mapping runs only while capture is enabled.
The Activity mapping section shows Mapping enabled with the next scheduled run, or Mapping disabled, along with the Last run status. Select Open activities folder to see the activities from the latest run. To stop sharing, select Disable mapping. Turning off capture also turns off mapping.
Clear local journal deletes only data on your computer. It doesn't delete activity records that Glean Tau has already uploaded to your Glean account.
Your admin can manage capture, the capture interval, and activity mapping for you. If they do, the control shows a Managed by your organization badge.
Limitations
- Recall is bounded, not exhaustive. Activity Journal keeps history for 7 days and caps the store, so it removes older entries. It samples on an interval, so it misses anything between samples.
- Recall depends on captured text. Glean Tau matches your search terms against recorded app names, window titles, and on-screen text. The agent picks those terms and can try more than one, so you don't have to phrase your question exactly. An on-screen word you remember still gives the most reliable result.
- Captured content is untrusted evidence. Glean Tau labels journal content as historical evidence, and treats text captured from your screen as data, not instructions.
- The journal stays on your computer. Journal entries don't sync to other devices. Activity records from activity mapping are the only data uploaded to your Glean account.
- Chats that use the journal send what they find to the model. When a chat uses Activity Journal, the matching entries and any snapshot it opens, including the screenshot and accessibility text, are added to that chat's model context. This happens even when activity mapping is off.
- Some Windows content isn't captured. Activity Journal doesn't capture the Windows desktop or taskbar. Some built-in Windows apps, such as Settings, expose little or no accessibility text.
See also
- Settings — manage local storage and clear extension data
- Extensions — the full list of extensions and their default states