What happens when you actually track where your time goes

You were busy all day. You know you were. But then someone asks what you actually got done and you kind of blank. It’s not that you were slacking, you were going the entire time. You just can’t point to where it all went.

Turns out that’s not a you problem. A study in PLOS One tracked how long people actually spent on tasks versus how long they thought they spent. They overestimated 78% of the time, by a median of 45%. And most of them were confident they could track their time accurately.

I built a time tracking app called Takt for bridging that gap between gut feeling and evidence. The ironic part is I don’t have a clear picture of how long it actually took. When I finally finished initial development and started tracking, I started getting a solid grip on where my time was going throughout my day.

“Did that really take 5 hours?”

When I showed Takt to someone in my family, their first reaction was that it looked dead simple. Then they went “oh, so I’d finally know if that slim report actually took the 5 hours I think it did, or if I’m fudging.” How long things actually take, more precisely, that’s the whole point of this tool.

It goes both ways. Something you’ve been dreading because “it takes forever” might be 40 minutes of actual work surrounded by avoidance. Or a task that felt quick has been quietly eating your afternoons because you never clocked the back-and-forth around it.

This matters if you bill for your time, because vague estimates drift. But it’s just as useful if you don’t. Knowing your morning routine takes an hour and a half instead of the 45 minutes you planned for stops you from starting every day behind.

You already knew. Now you can’t unsee it.

The time wasters I found were exactly the ones I suspected.

Most people know where their time leaks. You know you get pulled away too often between tasks. You know that meeting runs long every week.

What tracking does is put a number on it. And a number turns a vague gut feeling into something concrete. Sometimes it confirms what you suspected. Sometimes it’s a pleasant surprise, like finding out you get more done than you thought, even on the days that felt slow.

Try it

Track what you do for a week. Just log what you’re doing as you’re doing it, not from memory at the end of the day.

Use whatever works for you. Pen and paper, a spreadsheet, an app. I built Takt because I wanted something I could glance at on my lock screen without thinking about it, and change what is tracked easily, but the tool matters way less than the data from noting start and end times on paper.

A week is enough. You’ll see the patterns right away.