Can you stop tracking time? Will you?
Apps and time management software squeeze the joy out of our experiences
I’ve become suspicious of time tracking practices in the past two years while using toggl, my personal time tracking software. Tracking so meticulously is messing with my head, despite all the habit change gurus that tell me to do this.
I track a lot of other things too. There’s something awfully satisfying seeing those “trend” graphs as I track daily steps. I even met my husband via one a tracking app! DailyMile, an early social media platform for runners. You didn’t realize it could also be a dating platform, did you?! 👀
I signed up to track the mileage on my shoes (initally) and to help myself track workouts. I planned to build from 10K runs to 10 milers, and then half marathons.
My favorite part was visual: daily graph, weekly graphs, monthly graphs. I could see my progress over time, and it was rewarding to watch those bars go up. Until they didn’t go up anymore.
I’d gotten linked up with “a bad crowd” as my husband jokes. (It turns out the bad crowd includes the friends that turned up to his mom’s funeral, and drive 200+ miles up the north shore for his birthday weekends).
We had become addicted to the running community back in 2010-2012, racing on weekends, traveling to fun destinations, and the dopamine hits of finish lines. At one point, hubby’s enthusiasm for his “marathon maniac” community got me to sign up for the “half fanatics.” I loved collecting the badges that came with increasing levels of mileage.
For the record, I was Half Fanatic number 483, and apparently my “page” of races when I was still tracking remains live even though they are in the 5 digits for members now. From my first half marathon in 2009, the Monster Dash, through the Lake Minnetonka Half I ran in 2015, there are 27 races listed.
I stopped tracking after I was promoted to a manager role in my job at a large medical device company. My life became busier and more hectic with more travel and more meetings. Though I still ran, my need to track races and collect badges subsided.
Without the need to collect badges, I ran for me. I ran because it was a wonderful way to “clear the cobwebs” of stress and get a great boost of energy when my brain was fried from medical device mania.
When DailyMile went dim in 2019 after 10 years I felt sad. I’d stopped tracking in probably 2017 or so, realizing that running wasn’t something I needed to track anymore. I was doing more yoga, learning to dance, and running less, finding that less miles actually felt good to my body overall.
Hip and knee injuries that had periodically crept up when I was running more than 80 a month disappeared. I found that I was able to stay on a more sensible eating plan, and that exercise was not related to weight loss. I’d gained weight the one year I completed a marathon (2011). When I ran more, I used it as an excuse to eat more… 🙀
Today, my phone and other apps track steps, time, phone usage, weight, and many other things I haven’t bothered to examine.
But something new is emerging in me. I don’t want to be attached to these numbers all the time. I want to be less obsessed with my own metrics and instead trust my internal sense of what needs to be done.
What I do now:
Obsess about the numbers, look at my step graphs over time and notice when I’m falling short.
Inconsistently track my work time on toggl. Wonder why I can’t include one task in more than one category. Get frustrated by the linearity of how most (neurotypical) people work. Track obsessively some weeks, and can’t be burdened at other times, thus rendering it all pretty useless.
Binge podcasts when I know it would serve me better to create than consume.
Fall down the rabbithole of looking at email on my phone, not wanting to crack open the laptop to “work” (ostensibly) but also knowing that I hate replying with thumbs only.
Surf around for something I can consume instead of sitting and observing the discomfort inside myself, and exploring that instead.
A truncated Peter Drucker quote has taken hold of how people behave these days: “what gets measured gets managed.”
Unfortunately the truncated version neglects the portion of the larger sentiment he expressed:
“What gets measured gets managed - even when it’s pointless to measure and manage it, and even when it harms the purpose of the organization to do so.”
Ohhh!
I fall into this trap again and again. Measuring and logging things. Tracking. Try to help myself “get better” and more consistent. Hogwash.
Sometimes it is useful.
When I was trying to get more sleep on a regular basis, I started tracking it. I wasn’t elaborate. I certainly didn’t use the phone app for it, preferring Arianna Huffington’s habit of escorting devices out of the bedroom at least 2 hours before bed. I note my estimated hours slept each morning when I wake up.
This was helpful because I noticed that there were times when I found it more difficult to sleep. When my body got TOO wired, or my adrenals were pumping out cortisol to contend with work stresses, it was like a switch getting welded into the “on” position for days or weeks.
Tracking helped me realize when I needed to power down early, whether or not my over-excitable brain “wanted” to do this (never, as it turns out) but my body needed it. The lunar cycle and my menstrual cycle clearly influenced this, along with what I was eating, drinking, and the kinds of media I was consuming.
I still track sleep out of habit. I take medicine that’s a stimulant, and I like to track how much caffeine I’m taking in, and make sure I’m not overdoing it. Even though adderall is a godsend for living in a world that wasn’t designed for me (and has less side effects than caffeine for me) my blood pressure can be affected. It’s no joke.
Sleep tracking, and paying attention to stimulate intake feel like useful data to track.
However, time tracking is making me a little crazy. As a self-employed person, it can be helpful to know how long things take. I used to spend WAY too long on my client coaching follow up notes, for example. Now I’ve set a limit for myself, which cuts down on the perfectionistm and allows me to bottom-line the notes.
It was recommended to me by a prospective virtual assistant 2 years ago when I reached out, to figure out where I was spending my time using toggl, before opting to hire someone to delegate my difficulties. In theory, this is helpful.
But I prefer to look at friction versus flow, like
recommends in her book Free Time. When I am in flow, work feels joyful, even if there is some effort involved. When I’m friction, it’s probably the swearing, and general frustration that causes everything to take two or three times as long.***
Again I remember: TIME is NOT LINEAR.
All these ways of managing our time give us a false impression of what’s really important.
It’s helpful to know how long it takes me to produce a podcast, or write a blog post. It helps me allocate the time more intentionally and to plan my weeks. But time for me is not the same as it is for neurotypicals. I “lose” hours on the clock when I’m intensely focused on a project that interests me.
And half the time I’m working, I dive right in and forget to log that time. Then I remember and log for 5 minutes and realize there’s actually another, more urgent priority. And I think: should I stop the timer and work on that one minute task?
Or is it more important to just average out the time?
And some days, I simply CANNOT get myself to focus on a task that I really dislike. All the bribes in the world and cleverly designed consequences fail to move my inner Bartleby.
I sometimes make odious tasks bearable by offering myself some ping pong mentally. I will work on that task, and also listen to an audiobook. And yes, I realize this breaks the rule of single-tasking, that everyone tells us we must do. (Mea culpa, personal development police…)
If I cannot allow my mind to work the way it works most naturally, I lose the creative spark, the electric juice of inspiration. This is going against every bit of advice I’ve received from the coaching world and the efficiency gurus.
I am apprehensive to give up all the tracking.
Okay, actually freaked out about it. But I also feel this deserves an experiment.
Can I turn off the step tracking on my phone, to make myself less obsessed with the days I don’t “walk enough” (whatever that means)?
No. But I will think about it.
Will I stop tracking the time I spend on work?
Maybe.
Could I make a more creative way to do this, that makes me feel less enslaved to devices and my inner compulsive perfectionist (Codename: Big Sis)?
I love Pomodoros for writing, as I mentioned to
in a recent podcast episode. Her work has inspired me to get started on a bigger book project again.25 minute chunks are lovely, with 5 minute “body” breaks in between. I can seldom do more than 2 or 3 on the hardest work. But they enabled me to write the first book. And they even help me sit to work on finances when everything in me resists.
Of course I can sit down for 25 minutes and work on it. (Almost) nothing will kill us for that long, as long as we are still breathing…
But tracking the quantity of time says NOTHING about the quality of that time. And I feel tangible differences in my hyper-focus states versus what I think of as my “ping pong” states. That’s what I’m more interested in, quality versus quantity. Kairos versus Chronos, as my friend Patrick and I discussed on the Somatic Wisdom podcast in June.
I journal daily, and I am tracking my overall emotional state on a regular basis, while not obessessing over each hour, and each minute.
I opened this piece with a question that’s meant for me, actually. But I wonder if it’s also meant for you.
Thanks for the mention! I totally appreciate how over tracking can weigh you down. When I was running I bought a garmin to track distance. After a month, I realized I was so focused on the numbers and not how I felt...or even enjoying the run anymore. I quickly sold it and went back to running for the joy of it.