One week I suddenly realized I did so much during the week but there’s nothing to show for it. You know that feeling that you don’t have anything to tell your friend that you did that week.

I gave time tracking a shot to see what will I find. Rescue time looked like a simple tool that gets the job done. I used Activity Watch before and the main lacking feature was syncing and the mobile app (at the time they now have a new mobile app.)

Turns out my feeling was right, next week I saw around 8 hours of my week during work time spent in meeting, Slack in discussions. Other than that it showed me how much time I spend on social media and other things that does not achieve anything. So basically I was spending a lot of time on things that don’t produce anything. It’s not fun to talk with someone about how many work discussions they had last week.

After a couple of months I notice the change in how I use my time. I don’t really use the time tracking to find out how much time I spend on what. I just use it to find out if I spend too much time idling and not doing anything or not. These days even if I don’t use it any more I will keep the few habits it helped me to create.

Use devices purposely

Use the phone or the computer for a purpose. This is basically what all the app blockers do. They want to block the distractions so you think okay what did I want to do?

Sometimes there is nothing to do with your phone. You just want the time to pass or rest a bit. What about reading a book, sleeping or doing something that requires no effort?

Think about total time spent

It’s easy to notice when you spend 1 hour in a day scrolling through content and not doing anything. But it’s harder to notice it if it’s half an hour every day. But if you think about it that results in 3.5 hours per week. 3 hours sounds a lot really a lot can be done with that time, even adding it to the sleep sounds better.

I tracked time for the full month and saw how much time I’m spending on things that are not really useful. I tried to limit them. As a result I just did what was necessary. For example what I mentioned all the time in discussions at work. I limited that to a certain amount per day. This forced me to say what I had to say in slack and continue doing what I was doing.

Do not care too much about the graphs

These apps usually give you a lot of scores, graphs and data to play with. I don’t think it’s useful to look at them. It’s a distraction, and it can drag you down into optimizing the wrong thing.

The most important part is that, you spend time on what you want and distractions are not in your way. This can be seen by how much time you are spending on the distractions during the day. So I think if the distractions are taking very little time. Then the rest of the time is free. Free time plus boredom is all needed to do what you want to do. Unless you don’t want what you want.

I don’t know if time tracking is necessary or not. Maybe after a while these habits are shaped, so it’s not needed any more. I think if there’s something that grabs your attention, and you want to do it, you will do it. No focus or do not disturb mode needed for true captivation. But all the other times it’s easy to get distracted and not find the intriguing.