What focuses me is remembering this mantra attributed to Steve Jobs:

Real Artists Ship

The idea that nothing you’re working on is real until you ship it to customers, users, or whoever the stakeholders are.

Helps a lot against bouncing between lots of projects and not making much progress on any of them.

I spent a few months doing some coarse time tracking at work - basically I'd retroactively add and edit events on my calendar to reflect what I had actually done during the workday, down to 15 minute increments. I binned them into IC work, meetings, interruptions, and non-work stuff. While I did get some insights about where my time was going, it mostly just made me really anxious and input-oriented about my productivity and made feel guilty if I didn't end up working a full 8 hours on a given day. Stopping the time tracking was good for my mental health.

Hey man, the best way to go about this — is to gamify your schedule and make your self do the items you desire to do. Whatever you plan for your day 8-9am every day, can be “read only” until you journal eod.

Trust me, I’m adhd. Good luck!

the solution might be checklisting in lieu of time tracking - rather than note what you spend each moment on, define tasks and subtasks, and work on one set of subtasks at a time. the checklist helps maintain focus because if you think of something random you can note it down for later rather than jump straight into it.

I first started tracking time many years ago explicitly with the goal of more intentionality and focus on a single task. If I recall correctly the tip came from CGP Grey (of old-YouTube fame) on one of the podcasts he was doing at the time.

i looked at the overall shape of the words and punctuation on this page and thought, oh this looks like adhd, let me scroll down... yup adhd. didnt read any of it though cause it reminds me of something that i need to do that ive never thought of before, so now i have to go do that thing

I don't understand the problem here. If you cannot focus, just focus more?

More structure/checklist to force you to focus will have other side-effects like you found out. When you get rid of the structure, you still need to have a rough map in your mind of where you want to go.

To me, this is similar to being honest. You don't want to depend on a system or checklist for being honest. It is something you always need, as a policy. Focus is like that. If you want to focus seriously on something, just make it a policy, and don't use all these tricks as crutches.

It sounds like two factors are at work - reducing personal time-tracking AND doing more AI-assisted work, both of which can reduce our ability to focus. In the case of AI, it also arguably reduces the need to focus for some kinds of productivity, so the net effect of increased output is expected.

If it helps, you can get AI to do the admin task of time tracking automatically, at least for anything that it is involved with.

Good for you to have figured this out! This is how I always work, and I am as productive as I can be because I only do what's on top of my mind. I've also learned that if something is never on top of my mind it's because it's not worth doing, so it gets filtered away automatically.

I probably am in a privileged position to be able to do this (greenfield research in the private sector), but I just love it.

Calendars can be powerful focusing tools.

Was there a point to this article?

I sure couldn't find it: to me it read like "I time tracked, now I don't" with no actual insight or conclusion into why either might be preferable.

you could do the time tracking after the fact?

record start and end times with the project name, then eventually assign that project to a bucket

I track my time even though I don't have clients. I find it helps me say "ok this next block is for this task" and it helps me keep focus.

As someone who helps small businesses leverage their labor efficiency, I can definitively say that nothing gets better without tracking time and working out what's working (and not).

The great thing here is that OP worked something out. My suspicion is that they were simply working on the wrong things (intent vs. actual benefit were incompatible), and therefore felt strange recording time for the sake of it — there was no gratification that the decision they made to spend time on something, the act of laboring over something they felt was meaningful in the moment, and the resulting benefit were never congruous.

Remember: recording time isn't the benefit. It's the tell that gives us a hint as to how we spent time and a smoking gun if we're not doing anything worthwhile. My suggestion for OP: do what works for you, even if it's batshit in the moment. Maybe you're better at jazz than most of us.

Hey Joe, I think the solution to your problem is in your post. You said that when you were tracking your time it killed your idea, and that when you stopped tracking your time you became unfocused.

Try letting AI classify your idea into a time-tracking bucket for you, and to generate a beginning of day report describing how you spent your time yesterday.

If you write down your idea, then it'll be harder to forget it. You can let the AI figure out where to put it and fix it the next day if it's wrong.

If you look at where you spent your time yesterday each morning, then hopefully it'll help you figure out a better place to spend your time today.

You can easily set this up with any harness. Just copy and paste my comment and tell the AI to make some skills.