The year 2018 marked a significant turning point in my life: I graduated and embarked on my first job, while simultaneously considering the pursuit of a PhD. This period was fraught with challenges, as I juggled the demands of starting a new role as the associate to the president of a private university in Berlin—an endeavor that proved to be overwhelming due to the immense responsibilities thrust upon me—and my lack of experience and work structuring.
My approach to work at that time was unstructured, a carryover from my university days, and I found myself dissatisfied with my productivity and overall work habits. The job itself was a bit of a disaster in the beginning, as I struggled to cope with the vast array of tasks without a clear strategy in place. There was an undeniable sense that I had too much on my plate, and no discernible path on how to manage it effectively.
It was in this state of overextension that I turned to time tracking. I sought to gain a better understanding of where my hours were going and to develop a system that would help me handle my workload more efficiently.
And indeed, time tracking had a significant positive impact on my work process.
The Ways in Which It Helped Me
The effect was twofold: First, it helped me understand where my working hours were going. That was important because I had at least three major commitments at the time: my job as a research assistant, the early stages of my PhD, and this blog. On top of that, I had just started following the ideas from Deep Work by Cal Newport*, which meant I also wanted to spend more time reading, exercising, and generally developing myself personally. Not an easy balancing act.
Time tracking allowed me to get an overview and develop a sense of how different workloads actually feel. It’s quite comparable to calorie tracking: when you rigorously track your food intake for a while, you develop an awareness of what you’re eating, gain a better understanding of which foods are hidden calorie bombs and which aren’t. Similarly, it helped me better assess both myself and my productivity. I started to get a feel for how long it typically takes me to complete a specific task.
But time tracking had another positive effect: it added a sense of accountability to my work. Pressing the start button felt like a commitment to genuinely focus and work. A fairly simple psychological trick, for sure—but one that worked. And as we know, that’s what really counts.
The technical implementation
Before I get into why I no longer track my time—despite all the clear benefits—I want to briefly explain how I set it up technically.
The answer is simple: Toggl and Timery. Toggl is a web-based time tracking service that can be used for free. However, since I didn’t really like the official apps, I used Timery from the start. Timery is developed by an independent developer and is available for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, which means it’s always within easy reach. It also integrates very well with Siri Shortcuts, so you can even build your own workflows if the app’s standard features aren’t enough for your needs.
I organized things by creating projects for the major areas of my life, then used tags to further specify what kind of work I was doing. For example, I had a project called PhD, and under that, I used tags to track tasks like administrative work or actual content-related research. I also had a few more general timers, like one for exercise. This setup allowed me to clearly see how I was dividing my time across the different spheres of my life. It also helped me check whether I was spending my time on the right kind of work—such as actually doing substantive research for my PhD, rather than getting lost in admin tasks.
And Why I Have Stopped
So, why did I decide to stop tracking my time at the end of 2024? And did I replace it with something else—or am I now just working however I feel like?
Primarily, after so many years, I no longer felt that time tracking was giving me more value than it was costing me in effort. You constantly have to remember to start and stop the timer, which adds to your mental load—compared to simply sitting down and getting to work. But what ultimately made the difference for me was that I began to feel restricted by the sense of work obligation I mentioned earlier. Once I activated a specific timer, I felt like I was only allowed to work on that one task. Of course, that’s irrational—but psychologically, it affected me that way. More and more, I felt like I was forcing myself into a rigid structure that wasn’t doing me any good.
And that brings me to the second point: After so many years of analyzing my habits, I had already developed highly productive practices. In other words, I had solved the original problem. Time tracking—especially the end-of-year reports—had become more of a nice gimmick than something that offered real value to my work.
Thirdly, at some point, it became an end in itself. It was no longer about completing meaningful tasks, but about accumulating as much time as possible under specific projects. And that’s just completely absurd.
So, in October or November 2024, I decided to stop. I had originally planned to finish the year, but in the end, I just let it go—and it felt incredibly liberating.
The Daily Achievement Score as an Alternative
Does this mean I no longer quantify my work at all? No. Instead, I came up with a system designed to measure my progress in a goal-oriented way. I now assign each task in my to-do manager a score from 1 to 5—depending on how demanding and important it is. You can think of it like story points in software development. It’s not always perfectly accurate, of course, but over time I’ve developed a pretty good sense of what counts as a 2-point task versus a 4- or 5-point one. The next day, I add up how much I got done the day before.
This gives me a built-in incentive to tackle the hard and genuinely important tasks, rather than just checking off administrative work. In the end, sure—it’s still a bit of a game. But it works well for me because I’m very responsive to gamification.
If this article shows anything, it’s this: Our needs evolve, and we should regularly reflect on whether our processes and tools still meet those needs. And when we realize they don’t, we shouldn’t hesitate to make a clean break.
