About

Fifty notes on personal time tracking, organised around a single claim: measurement is a cost, and it is paid in the thing being measured.

Who this is for

Anybody who has started tracking their time and abandoned it, anybody considering starting, and anybody who has been tracking for months and is not sure what it has produced.

The position

Continuous tracking is the wrong default. Products are sold on it because that is the business model. For most people the honest answer is a bounded investigation of two weeks, repeated occasionally.

The research is thinner than the market implies. Figures for switching costs, optimal work intervals and productivity gains are widely quoted and mostly do not have sources that support them. Where the evidence is good — that people estimate their own time badly, that sleep displacement matters — the notes say so.

And measuring can become the activity. That has its own section, because it is common rather than unusual.

What is deliberately absent

How to track a colleague without them knowing, which is workplace surveillance rather than personal tracking.

How to use a record to win an argument with a partner, which a one-sided record cannot honestly do.

How to make figures look better for an employer.

These appear only in the notes explaining why they should not be done.

No product names

The useful distinctions here are between methods, not between tools. A diary is a diary whether it is a notebook or an application, and naming products would make this collection indistinguishable from the market it describes.

About the reading times

Each note carries the time it takes to read, counted from the text at 220 words a minute and rounded up. A collection about the cost of measurement ought to state its own.

About this domain

This address previously belonged to a tool retailer in Montreal.

None of its material is here, and nothing can be bought at this address. If you were looking for the shop, search for it by name.