The Problem
More and more developers are using Claude Code for client work — myself included. But there’s one need that hasn’t been addressed: how do you accurately track Claude Code working hours?
For hourly-billed projects, clients can ask for time logs at any moment. And if you’re any good with Claude Code, you’re probably running four or five projects in parallel across split windows. How do you accurately calculate the actual time spent on a specific project — including conversations, file reads, writes, and tool calls — minus all the idle time when you went to grab coffee or reply to messages?
I looked around. Nobody had built this. So I built it myself.
claude-work-timer
claude-work-timer is an open-source CLI tool that reads your Claude Code session history and calculates precise conversation and tool-call durations.
Here’s what it does:
- Reads session JSONL history files
- Calculates actual time spent on each conversation turn and tool call
- Automatically strips out idle gaps longer than 5 minutes
- What’s left is your real working time
It supports filtering by project, so even if you had five projects running simultaneously, you can get a separate time report for each one.
Installation and Usage
The easiest way: paste the GitHub link into Claude Code and ask it to install the tool and check your project hours. It’ll handle everything.
Or install manually:
npm install -g claude-work-timerCheck working hours:
claude-work-timer --project /path/to/your/projectGitHub repo: github.com/danyuchn/claude-work-timer