Should you track how you spend your time?
Logging how you spend your hours, manual or automatic time tracking, tools for it.
Axis: track your time by hand … don't track it at all
Answers by date: 5 records in 3 sources, newest first; the answers above are the current ones. The advice was refined (2024), never reversed, in these records.
| date | who | answer | source |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2024-12-17 | Ali | Ali's goal for the focus log is about four hours of focus a day, which he calls the upper limit. | How to Change Your Life with Deep Work (My System) 00:25:00 |
| 2024-12-17 | Ali | Ali says the one thing that will radically change your relationship to deep work is keeping track of how many minutes or hours you actually spend focusing each day. | How to Change Your Life with Deep Work (My System) 00:23:04 |
| 2024-12-12 | Ali | Ali's fourth habit is the focus log: giving yourself visibility on how many minutes you focus on what matters most profoundly influences your ability to do it. | 6 Habits to Make 2026 Your Best Year Yet 00:14:43 |
| 2024-03-29 | Ali | For Ali it is manual time tracking, more than automatic apps like Rize, that moves the needle for focus; with whatever tool, he says, tracking your time is almost guaranteed to improve your focus. | Stop Wasting Time - 11 Tools to Double Your Focus 00:11:50 |
| 2024-03-29 | Ali | If you are new to time tracking, Ali recommends starting with a YouTube video and a Google Doc rather than a timer app such as Toggl, since remembering to start and stop a timer may be a bit much. | Stop Wasting Time - 11 Tools to Double Your Focus 00:08:38 |