I Tracked Every Minute of My Workday for Two Weeks

Not to optimize. Just to see where the time actually went.

The result was humbling. I spent about four hours a day in tools that were supposed to help me work and about two hours actually working. The rest was switching between them, checking them, and recovering from being interrupted by them.

I did not change anything after seeing this. But I stopped feeling guilty about the days where not much got done.

Those days were not lazy. They were just honest about how long things actually take when you are a person and not a machine.

Have you ever tracked your time just to see? And did the truth help or just depress you?