Guide

Customize Categories & Rules

DayReplay ships with detected categories that cover the common cases — browsers, IDEs, mail clients, communication tools. On Pro you can make categorisation your own: create your own categories and colours, then refine classification with domain rules for browser activity and process rules for desktop applications. This guide walks through all three, with a worked example for Microsoft Outlook on Windows and macOS.

Free tier shows the built-in rules read-only.

Any user can open the Category Rules dialog to inspect how things get classified. Adding, modifying, or removing rules requires Pro.

Open the Category Rules dialog

In DayReplay, click the tag icon in the toolbar (tooltip: Categories). The dialog shows two tables: one for domain rules and one for process rules. Each row maps a key — a domain or a process name — to a category. DayReplay ships with seven built-in categories (Development, Communication, Planning, Research, Media, Utilities, and Uncategorized), and on Pro you can add your own — see the next section.

DayReplay Category Rules dialog showing the domain and process rule tables, with a Microsoft Outlook process rule entry highlighted — The Category Rules dialog with both rule tables visible.

Create and colour your own categories

The seven built-in categories cover most workflows, but on Pro you can make the set your own. Click the Customize categories button in the Category Rules dialog to open the category editor.

Add a new category and give it a name and a colour.
Rename and recolour any category, including the built-ins.
Delete categories you created. The seven built-ins can be renamed and recoloured but not deleted, so existing rules never lose their target.

Set a colour by typing a #RRGGBB hex value or clicking one of the preset swatches. That colour is what each session shows on the timeline, so your day reads at a glance — deep work in one colour, meetings in another.

DayReplay Customize Categories editor showing the list of categories with editable names and colour swatches, plus the preset colour palette — The Customize Categories editor — rename, recolour, add, or delete categories.

Click Save categories to apply your changes, then map domains and processes to them using the rule tables below. As with rules, the editor is read-only on Free — you can open it to see the built-in categories, but creating and editing them requires Pro.

Add a domain rule

Domain rules apply when DayReplay sees the focused tab's URL in a tracked browser (Chrome, Edge, Firefox on Windows; Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari on macOS). Click the Add domain button under the domain rules table, then type the bare hostname:

github.com — works
mail.google.com — works (subdomains are matched exactly)
linear.app — works
https://github.com — rejected (no protocol)
github.com/anthropics/claude-code — rejected (no path)

Pick a category from the dropdown and click Save rules. The new rule applies on the next session refresh; restarting the app is not required.

Add a process rule

Process rules apply when DayReplay sees a desktop application in the foreground. The match key is the process name as the operating system reports it, which is not always the same as the application's display name. The simplest way to find it is in Task Manager on Windows, or Activity Monitor on macOS.

The rest of this section walks through a worked example: classifying the Microsoft Outlook desktop app as Communication on both platforms.

On Windows: Task Manager

Press Ctrl + Shift + Esc to open Task Manager (or right-click the taskbar and choose Task Manager).
Switch to the Details tab. The Name column shows the executable filename, including the .exe suffix.
Find the running application. For the new Outlook desktop app, the process is olk.exe; for classic Outlook (the older Office build), it is OUTLOOK.EXE.

Windows Task Manager Details tab with the olk.exe process row highlighted, showing the executable name DayReplay matches against — Task Manager Details tab — `olk.exe` is the new Outlook desktop app.

In DayReplay, enter the process name without the .exe suffix: type olk for the new Outlook, or outlook for the classic build. The match is case-insensitive.

On macOS: Activity Monitor

Open Activity Monitor from Applications → Utilities, or via Spotlight (⌘ + Space, then type “Activity Monitor”).
Use the Process Name column. macOS lists each running app by its localized display name, not by an executable filename.
For the Microsoft Outlook desktop app, the process name is Microsoft Outlook.

macOS Activity Monitor with the Microsoft Outlook process row highlighted, showing the process name DayReplay matches against — Activity Monitor — the process name is `Microsoft Outlook`.

In DayReplay, enter the process name as shown, including the space: Microsoft Outlook. The match is case-insensitive.

Cross-platform note

The same logical application often has different process names on Windows and macOS — Outlook is olk on Windows and Microsoft Outlook on macOS. If you use DayReplay on both platforms with the same license, add both entries so the application is categorised correctly regardless of which machine you are on. Rules are stored per-platform on each device; activating Pro on a new machine starts that machine with the built-in defaults.

Removing or modifying rules

Select a row in either table and click the Remove selected button. To modify a rule, edit the domain or process name in place; the dropdown next to it lets you change the assigned category. Click Save rules to persist your changes — Cancel discards them.

Related: How DayReplay works · Pricing · Security & privacy · FAQ.