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Comment by dgunay | Hacker News Reader

I spent a few months doing some coarse time tracking at work - basically I'd retroactively add and edit events on my calendar to reflect what I had actually done during the workday, down to 15 minute increments. I binned them into IC work, meetings, interruptions, and non-work stuff. While I did get some insights about where my time was going, it mostly just made me really anxious and input-oriented about my productivity and made feel guilty if I didn't end up working a full 8 hours on a given day. Stopping the time tracking was good for my mental health.

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Regarding the 8 hour, I've just come to realise that I can't get 8 productive hours in a day (I want to say most people can't but maybe I'm projecting). I track every day and the good days have around 5 hours tracked. The bad days around 2

Good to hear I'm not the only one.

I've tried it for a few months for 1-hour intervals and it wasn't as stressful, and was a useful exercise to understand how I'm using my time.

I feel like there's a few lessons here, depending on what your goal is: if you're mostly working, are those hours useful, and if you're not, do you care about it?

> made me really anxious and input-oriented about my productivity

Yes, exactly! Even if I got a bunch done I'd still feel like I didn't accomplish anything if I had "wasted" too much time.

Raw throughput and time efficiency should be treated as separate metrics. They should not be conflated with productivity, nor are they all that correlated to begin with. I define productivity as an abstract goal. The time tracking is information to satisfy my curiosity and gain insight. There's no place for quotas in my approach. There are only ever relative comparisons for me.

Time efficiency is just percent of the time range you arbitrarily defined filled by the tasks you explicitly defined. If it seems low it doesn't necessarily mean you aren't tracking enough things, but that your subtask definitions are too narrow.

Raw throughput is either the number of tasks completed or "points" redeemed, but often your subtask estimates are too "lumpy" or just flat out wrong.

I get that it's not for everyone, but there's nothing wrong with time tracking in itself. It's its own skill. Discomfort is usually a sign you need to try new techniques. Don't give up.

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