What to check when a report has a gap
If a report skips part of your day, the cause is usually one of four things: nothing was recorded, only app names were recorded, time was recorded but tied to no project, or the report summarized it away. The checks below run from the quickest to the most involved.
Start in the Trail, not the report
Open the Trail tab, choose the date, and look at the period you expected to see. The report is built from the same activity records plus whatever git, AI and shell sources you have turned on, so a stretch that is empty in the Trail cannot be filled in by the report. If the Trail has the work but the report does not, skip to the section on shorter reports.
Two things help you read a gap. The Show N away periods control on the Trail reveals the stretches Hina labelled Idle, Locked or Asleep, which tells you whether the Mac was sitting untouched or had gone to sleep. The Rhythm of the day section of the report also states how many breaks there were, how much time fell into gaps shorter than five minutes, and how much was not recorded at all. A blank in a chart means no recorded activity, which is not the same as no work.
Why a stretch has no records
Hina samples the foreground window every three seconds. When there has been no keyboard or mouse input for three minutes, it stops treating you as present and records an away stretch instead, and a locked screen or a sleeping Mac is recorded as away with its own reason. Nothing is written while recording is paused, and nothing is written while the foreground app is on your ignored list. Both leave a true blank.
To rule these out, open Settings from the logo menu and read Recording health on the General tab. It says Ready when all is well, and Paused, Permission needed, Write failed, Read failed or No recent records when something is wrong. The last one appears when the newest record is more than five minutes old. The same logo menu holds Pause recording and Resume recording, so a pause you forgot about is the first thing to rule out. Hina also has to be running, and Launch at login on the General tab starts it after you sign in.
A long stretch without input while you sat at your desk is a different case. If you were away from the keyboard for between ten minutes and two hours without locking the Mac, Hina asks once when you return what that time was, with the choices Meeting, Reading / thinking, Watching and Away. The card disappears after about a minute, and an unanswered question leaves the time as Away. Shorter and longer stretches are not asked about, and the length of an AI session never fills the space either.
Records with an app name but no title
If the Trail shows apps and durations but no document names, pages or repositories, the title was not recorded. Window titles and page paths are read only when Record window titles and page paths is switched on in the Privacy tab, and reading them also needs the Accessibility permission. On macOS 27 that permission is listed in System Settings as Device Control and Data Access. Without it Hina still records app names and time.
Some titles are held back on purpose. Password managers and private browser windows keep only the app name, and so do windows whose title contains one of the words you listed under Hide titles containing these words. A few apps expose no usable title at all. In search results these records read Only the app name was recorded.
Switching a setting on or restoring a permission changes what is captured from that moment. It does not fill in titles for hours already recorded. The existing app-only records still show which apps you used and for how long.
The Trail has it, but the report is shorter
The report selects activity, local commits and your prompts to AI. It does not copy every record. The Evidence section keeps more detail, and Search records shows what was captured without the report's selection. Try a search such as yesterday followed by a project name, a date, or a few words you remember from a page title.
Next, check which sources fed the report. The How this was made section lists what was missing, such as agent reading being off, no git repositories found under the folders you chose, or shell history being off. On the Data tab, Last daily report appears only when a source failed to read or was skipped, and names which one. A fresh install scans no repository folders until you choose them under Project folders used in reports, so a report with activity but no commits often just needs that folder added.
If only the project name is wrong, that is a naming question and not a gap. The article on how project time is attributed explains where the project name comes from.
Confirm the fix and know the limit
Pick a stretch you remember well, such as a meeting or a long writing session, and walk through it. Find it in the Trail, check Recording health, confirm that you are looking at the right workday, and then open the report again. A workday runs from 04:00 to 04:00, so work after midnight belongs to the previous day, and a late session can look missing when it is simply on the neighbouring date.
Some gaps cannot be recovered. Hina records what the Mac exposed at the time, so a stretch with Hina not running or an ignored app stays blank. Without Accessibility permission, app names and durations remain, but window details are missing. For those hours, git commits, shell history and your AI prompts can still hint at what happened if you enabled them, and the report lists them separately without a duration. Treat them as clues about that stretch, not as measured time.