Most people have a rough story about where their time goes, and it's usually wrong. This walkthrough closes the gap between the story and the truth: you'll capture time in a way that's almost free to maintain, then read it back through two different lenses until "where did the week go?" has an actual answer.
The work is in step 1 — building a light habit of tracking. Steps 2 and 3 are just reading what you already recorded.
The goal
Turn the hours you spend into something you can look at: which clients, projects, and kinds of work are really eating your week — so you can decide what to change instead of guessing.
1. Capture time without it becoming a chore
The trick to useful time data is that logging it has to cost almost nothing, or you won't keep it up. The time tracker is built for that.
- Start the timer, forget about it. Open the Time tracker, start the timer when you begin, stop it when you're done. The elapsed count is worked out from the start time, so reloading the page or switching devices picks it up exactly where it was.
- Resume instead of retyping. Coming back to something you did earlier? Resume starts a fresh entry that copies the name and task from your last one, and the running timer counts up from the total of the entries you tracked back to back on it — so a session you paused and picked up reads as one running figure. Once other work has interrupted a task, its whole-day total comes from insights or the task's own sidebar, not the timer.
- Backfill what you missed. Log entries by hand when you forget; they're indistinguishable from timed ones downstream.
The two things that make the data readable later are worth doing now, in the moment:
- Link entries to tasks. This is what lets you slice time by project and client, because tasks belong to projects and projects to clients.
- Add tags. Tags cut across that hierarchy —
deep-work,admin,meetings— so you can ask questions the project structure alone can't answer.
An entry can link to several tasks and still counts as one duration — linking never double-counts your time. So link generously; you're adding context, not hours.
2. Read it back as a breakdown
Once a week or two of time is in, open Time tracker insights and set a date range. This is the "where did it go?" view: a breakdown of your tracked time for that window, which you can group by task, project, or tag.
Try the same range grouped two ways. Grouped by task, you see which work consumed the hours. Grouped by tag, you see the shape of the time — how much was deep work versus admin versus meetings. The gap between how you thought you spent the week and what this shows is the whole point of tracking.
You can export the breakdown (CSV, XLS, or PDF) from the insights page if you want to keep or share it.
3. Compare periods and slices in a pivot
A single breakdown answers "where did this week go?". To answer "is this getting better or worse?", you need to compare — and that's what Time tracker reports is for.
Open Time tracker reports and build a pivot: rows and columns of your choosing (say, clients down the side, weeks across the top) with tracked hours in the cells. Now you can see one client's hours trending up across a month, or which day of the week your deep work actually happens. Insights tells you about one period; reports lets you line periods up against each other.
What you end up with
A habit that costs a few clicks a day, and two ways to read it: a breakdown for "where did this week go?" and a pivot for "how is this changing?". Once the numbers are in front of you, the decisions — raise a rate, drop a commitment, protect a morning — get a lot easier to make.