Activity — where your time went
An optional, off-by-default record of how much you actually watch on YouTube — measured in your browser, kept on your account, and drawn on your dashboard.
CoursifyYT can show you where your YouTube watch time actually went — how much, when, and on which channels. It is off until you turn it on, it is kept on your CoursifyYT account so it follows you between browsers, and one button erases all of it.
Why it exists
CoursifyYT's whole reason for being is to let you use YouTube for education without the distraction — and the distraction is precisely the part a course-only counter cannot see. A page that reported your virtuous hours back to you and stayed silent about the three that pulled you away would not be a smaller version of this feature. It would be a flattering one, and it could not answer the only question worth asking.
That is why it watches every YouTube watch page rather than only your courses — and why it is off by default, explicitly consented to, and erasable in one press. The two halves hold each other up: broad and silent would be surveillance; narrow and consented would be a feature that does not work.
Turning it on
Sign in. Activity is kept on your account, so it needs one. Without a session the switch is not shown at all.
Open Settings — ☰ → Settings in the panel header, or the same screen in the popup.
Find Activity, just above Data. It lists exactly what would be recorded.
Flip Record my Activity. From that moment on, time accrues.
Press Open my Activity — or go to coursifyyt.com/activity, the fourth tab of your dashboard.
What counts as watch time
Elapsed wall-clock time during which all of these are true: the video is actually playing, the tab is visible, and the window has focus.
A paused video counts for nothing. Neither does a buried background tab, or a page left open while you do something else.
Adverts count for nothing. YouTube plays them through the same player, so an ad break would otherwise read as time on a video you have not started.
Nothing is estimated. There is no modelled figure, no extrapolation and no "probably watched" anywhere on the page. If it says 42 minutes, 42 minutes elapsed.
Long evenings split correctly. A stretch that crosses an hour is divided between the hours it covers, and one that crosses midnight between both days — so the peak-hours chart does not pile a whole film onto the hour you pressed play. Your browser does that split, using your own clock, before anything is sent.
What the page shows
| Panel | What it answers |
|---|---|
| Tiles | Total time, daily average, sittings, distinct videos, long-form vs Shorts, current streak |
| Watch time | One column per day, split by long-form / Shorts / live, and your busiest day |
| Top channels | Where the time went, and how much of it could be attributed to a named channel |
| Peak hours | Which hours of the day you actually watch in |
| Weekly pattern | The average for each weekday, over the days in range |
| Activity | A square per day for a whole year — blank means no record, not zero |
| Learning activity | Notes taken, quiz papers, quiz accuracy and cards reviewed, on the same days |
One control sits above all of it: a range — today, week, month, 3 months, year, or all time.
Review sessions are part of the same switch
Turning Activity on also keeps a history of your flashcard reviews. Without it, a review session's numbers — accuracy, and how well your confidence matched the outcome — are shown once and then gone. With it, one row a day is kept: how many cards, how many were right, and the calibration sums. It is a daily total, never a log of individual cards, so which cards you were overconfident about last September is not something it can answer, by design.
This used to be a second switch of its own. It is one switch now, because they are one feature: both are recorded for the same reason, kept in the same place, and drawn on the same page — and a settings screen that asks twice for what a person thinks of as one decision mostly teaches them to stop reading the ask. The disclosure you agree to names both before you can turn anything on.
Where it lives
On your account, on our server. That is what makes it survive a reinstall, a new laptop and a cleared profile — and it is a real trade, stated plainly: we hold this data, so you should read what we do with it before turning it on.
Used for one thing. Drawing your own Activity page. It is never sold, never shared with anyone, and never used to train anything.
Measured in your browser. The extension does the measuring and the day-and-hour arithmetic; what reaches us is already-bucketed totals, not a live feed of what you are watching right now.
Yours to take, and yours to delete. It is in Settings → Account → Download my data, and one button erases it everywhere.
No new permission was needed for it. The extension already runs on youtube.com and already talks to coursifyyt.com. Privacy →
Keeping less, and erasing it
While recording is on you choose how long it is kept: everything, 12 months, or 6 months. Anything past the bound is deleted from your account, not merely hidden.
Erase my Activity takes all of it at once — every day, the index, the date recording started, and the record of your consent — and then tells you how many days went. Erasing turns recording off with it; switching it back on is one click and starts a fresh record. Turning recording off on its own leaves what was already recorded alone, and offers you the erase in case that is what you meant.
Questions
Does it record what I search for, or what I click?
No. It records which video was playing, for how long, and when. Not searches, not keystrokes, and nothing outside YouTube.
Will my other computer see these numbers?
Yes. That is the point of it being on your account: sign in on a second browser with recording on, and both feed the same picture.
What happens if I'm offline, or signed out?
Measurements wait in the extension until there is a connection and a session, then go up in one batch. Nothing is lost to a train journey. If you turn recording off while some are still waiting, they are thrown away rather than sent later.
Why is there no “only my courses” filter any more?
It needed the course tree to know which videos belong to a course, and the tree is shared infrastructure keyed by channel rather than part of your account — the same reason your Courses tab shows counts and not percentages. A denominator we do not have is not one we will guess at.
I turned it on last week. Why does the year view look empty?
Because it is. Those days are marked
not recorded
rather than filled with zeros — only days after you switched it on can say anything at all.
Does having it on cost me anything from my free allowance?
No. It uses no AI and no key, so there is nothing to spend.