I’ve logged my work time (automatically with time tracking apps) for over a decade. I’ve also done a significant amount of hourly-rate consulting where I’m very careful to only bill for actual working time.
When I was younger, one of my early challenges was that I had been misled to believe that only time spent in the editor, writing code counted as “working”. There’s a somewhat pervasive idea among devs that meetings, e-mail, communications, team discussions, and other such facts of business do not count as work when you’re a programmer. It led to some anxiety before I accepted that collaboration and communication is also work, something that seems obvious in retrospect but was difficult to swallow as a young programmer raised on Internet forums.
Some people default to the other extreme, where they seem to count every hour as “work” if they did anything remotely related to work during that hour. By now, I’ve worked with a lot of people who claim 60-80 hour work weeks simply because they check their phone and type out single-sentence replies in Slack or e-mails on evenings and weekends. Some of the laziest, least productive people I've worked with are the same people posting on LinkedIn on Sunday morning about their 80 hour grinds every week.
Two better metrics I’ve found for gauging productivity are total hours spent in work mode (in the office, or sitting at my home office desk) and total time spent in time wastes (Hacker News, non-work Slacks, Twitter, and so on). If I’m accumulating more than 30 minutes commenting on HN or scrolling Twitter, it’s a sign that I’m not really engaged with work and I need to shake things up.
I’ve shared my time tracking tools and techniques with a lot of people that I’ve mentored. It’s some times shocking for someone to realize that they’ve been spending 4 hours on social media (Discords, HN and Reddit are social media) during a what’s supposed to be a workday. Many of them gauge their own level of focus as average or better than average before actually tracking it. They might even be surrounded by friends or peers who engage in the same amount of distraction during the day, reinforcing their own behavior. Usually once they see what they’re doing as a hard number they can take steps to break the habit, but for some it’s so deeply engrained that they don’t understand what they’re doing until they see it as a number.
