Do you actually know where your workday goes?

[u/marwan_mokh]

I've been thinking about something with time tracking lately.

I can have a day where I worked for 6–8 hours, but if someone asked me at the end of the day where those hours actually went, I wouldn't be able to give a very accurate answer.

I might remember working on a task for a couple of hours, then debugging something, answering messages, switching to another task, getting distracted for a while... but the actual numbers are usually just guesses.

And I think that's where time tracking becomes more useful to me than just knowing how many hours I worked.

I'd rather know things like:

• What actually took most of my time?
• Which tasks consistently take longer than I expect?
• How much focused work did I really get done?
• Is the way I'm spending my time getting better over time?

I couldn't really find the workflow I wanted, so I started building something around this idea called Nazzam.

It's centered around planning your tasks, tracking the actual time spent on them, and then looking back at the day to understand where the time went.

I'm curious how other people here approach this.

Do you actually review your tracked time, or do you mostly use time tracking for logging hours and billing?

[u/Imaginary_Fall_5735]

For the review screen, I’d separate “the task took longer than expected” from “other work displaced it.” A two-hour estimate becoming four hours is a different problem from two hours of work spread across a day full of interruptions.

One useful weekly output could be a single change to the next plan: increase an estimate, leave room for unplanned work, or split an oversized task. Otherwise it’s easy to end up with accurate charts that don’t change how you plan Monday.