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Comment by fkdo | Hacker News Reader

Almost nobody tracks their time to better understand how they are spending it. I've talked to several people that have started, but even the most detailed oriented find it to not be worth the hassle.

If you really want this data, I think it's best to correlate data crumbs you leave after the fact and tally up your time at the end of the week. GPS data, computer activity logs, phone screen time, etc.

Another good enough answer is to track the time that is most important to you. Billable hours, exercise time, etc.

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I track all my time for the week in 15 minute intervals on a piece of paper, spending ~15 minutes planning my week on Sunday evening or Monday morning. Funny enough I started by doing what you suggest: only tracking the time that is most important. I would suggest the same for anyone thinking of trying this out.

I've been tracking all my productive hours since November 2018. I can highly recommend it. I also know some others that do the same. nateliason.com comes to mind.

It's not as insightful as I expected, but certainly brings about enough benefits to continue doing it.

I recommend everybody do it at least for a while, and go back to it when productivity suffers. It's remarkable how well it can keep you focused- not screwing off when you know you're going to have to write it down if you do.

I have done it before, there are tools that you can install that will capture the title of your active window and then graph it.

I can see if I spend 2 hours in Terminal or 1 hour in Vscode or 5 hours in Firefox. I can even see the title of sites I spent most time in the browser, etc.

That's the best approach I have found. One example I can think of is https://wakatime.com/ I personally use a python script I found a long time ago that does the same while keeping all my data locally. But it has less integrations and is not as nice.

> Almost nobody tracks their time to better understand how they are spending it.

It's not something a person needs to do forever (unless they want to), but doing it for a week or 2 can be very informative. It's a lot tracking what someone eats for a week to really understand where all the hidden calories are coming from. People are terrible at looking back any length of time and remembering the details of something.

This sounds like it's about accountability of your time, not understanding where your time goes. People already know they aren't doing what they want to be doing, so they have reminders to keep them accountable to themselves.

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