Why I don’t track my time
And the timer I use to do it
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Lots of freelancers swear by time tracking, and if you’re one of them, I’m jealous. Knowing how much time you spend on a work task, both generally and specifically, can help you set your rates, judge whether or not to accept certain assignments, define what counts as enough, and meet your financial goals. That’s the idea anyway. In practice, that’s not how it works for me.
How it works for me is that the instant I turn on a timer with the intention of tracking how long I spend on a project, I feel like I’ve already failed. I’ve already failed to spend the least time possible on whatever I’m working on. I’ve already failed to maximize my hourly rate. I’ve already failed to stay focused on one discrete, identifiable task for the whole period the timer is running. Every attempt at time tracking has left me feeling stressed out and already behind. Which, for me, is the fastest route to avoidance and procrastination. And what use is time tracking if I never start the work in the first place?
I do, however, know more or less how long different tasks will take me and how to fit them into my day, thanks to my predictable schedule with pre-determined breaks. I guess that’s a form of time tracking, but I never add anything up to find the total time I spent on a project or worked in a day or week or year. For me, that would defeat the purpose. Time tracking makes me feel like the seconds are counting down toward a deadline and/or my death; organizing my work into chunks that ebb and flow with my energy makes me feel like the day is filling up with satisfying things I want to do.
After more than ten years of being a freelance writer, I finally realized it’s not the amount of time I spend on a task that matters to my experience and the quality of the work. It’s how absorbed I become while I’m doing it. Equally important, however, is that I stop when I planned to, so I can recharge my energy and attention to the point where I can get absorbed again. But when I’m absorbed, it’s easy to not notice—or not care—that I’ve blown past the finish line.
And so, I set a timer, not to force myself to keep working, but to bring me back to the world. Specifically, this timer, a cute little dodecagon with a different number of minutes on each of its 12 faces, from one to 90. There’s no countdown or accumulation of minutes, just a blue light that glows while the timer is running. There’s not even a sound when it ends if you don’t want one, the light just blinks for a few seconds and turns off. I bought it thinking maybe it would help me finally implement the Pomodoro technique (25 minutes on, 5 minutes off). What it actually did was liberate me from thinking I needed the Pomodoro technique, or any time tracking practice, at all. The blue light doesn’t say, stay focused or else. It says, everything else can wait.