Time tracking is a popular productivity technique. Many people swear by it as the most effective intentionality tool. However, it never worked for me. It made things worse. Here, I explain the three reasons why it failed me.

Productivity and organization workflows can quickly become addictive. If you like apps and all that comes with them, your workflows can snowball out of control. I run into this problem every couple of years, and until I become aware of that, I feel very frustrated. I feel like I am moving around a lot of stuff and spending many hours of my awake time producing nothing more than heat and entropy. Luckily the solution is easy: do a total reset.

If there is something that I learned from my daily struggle with procrastination, is that every day you just have a limited amount of decisions. Every day, you can only do 5, 8, maybe 10 meaningfully decisions. After that you will start doing mistakes, get tired and, in general, doing wrong.

What can be surprising of this, is that doesn’t matter how important the decision is. Look at a traditional day: you wake up and you need to decide what to eat for breakfast, what clothes to wear, if it is better to go to work using the car or public transportation. You have literally just waked up and you have already depleted the big part of you decision pool for the day. And none of that decision is meaningful for your work, your career, your family, your affections.

You are finally back home. During your work day your mind was totally a volcano of creativity. You have so many cool ideas to implement (or at least to sketch). You go to your machine and you start to thing to the technical details. Many questions reach your mind. Maybe too many. Is it better to use Python or Haskell, or maybe C++? I have to start implementing my game prototype with Unity or with some other engine? What if in the future I want to add “feature X” after “feature Y”? So you start crawling the web for resources, opinions and more information on your problem. And this will generate more questions. You spend two hours in this way and you are still full of doubts. Then it becomes late. You are tired. You will check out this problems tomorrow. But tomorrow you will find others problem and not even a solution. And so on. Until every project loses its momentum.