Productivity through primary metrics: how to finally understand where your time goes
Published on: April 15, 2025
Introduction
In a world where we’re constantly offered new task management apps, time management techniques, and approaches to increase productivity, many of us find that despite all these tools, our real effectiveness barely changes.
We implement GTD, practice Pomodoro, use Kanban boards, read about Atomic Habits and Japanese Kaizen — but somehow we continue to feel overwhelmed and not productive enough, and often abandon these ideas altogether.
The main problem is that most productivity methods operate in a vacuum — they offer systems for organizing tasks but don’t address the fundamental question: what exactly are we spending our time on in reality. Without this basic understanding, even the most advanced methods remain just theoretical constructs that can’t significantly change our lives.
In this article, I propose a radically different approach to productivity, based on collecting and analyzing primary metrics — objective data about how your time is actually distributed.
We’ll look at the two most important resources – time and attention.
By honestly applying the practice I’m suggesting, you’ll be able to:
- See the real picture of your time expenditure without illusions or self-deception
- Identify hidden sources of time loss that you might not be aware of
- Create a personalized, convenient productivity system based on your preferences
Also from this article, you’ll learn:
- Why without primary metrics, any productivity system is almost certainly doomed to fail
- How I came to realize the importance of measuring time through personal experience
- A simple and flexible system for categorizing time that you can start using
- How to implement time tracking without turning it into an additional source of stress
- How to analyze the collected data and use it for real productivity improvements
Don’t worry — I’m not suggesting you become obsessed with every minute of your life. Instead, I’ll share a balanced and fundamental approach.
But all this will only work if you’re truly ready to finally see where your precious time is actually leaking away.
Why we need primary metrics
Primary metrics are extremely important whenever we truly strive to change any process for the better. Today we’re looking at our own lives and work on any projects as the process.
But first, I’ll tell you my path to the proposed system.
For quite a long time, I used todo lists and something resembling GTD. The everyday life of a family with a small child in rented housing in a foreign country can be quite unpredictable, but todo lists have increased my productivity over the past year and a half.
The more tasks I delegated to my todo list, the more computing power remained in my brain to perform work tasks more focused.
And I started to perform much more of them, so much so that I began to overwork in unhealthy proportions.
When I realized that overworking was a big problem, I started using time tracking to account for the time I spend on work. This was a purely intuitive decision; I was tired of overworking.
Although such tracking didn’t become a habit right away, over the course of several months I started working a reasonable amount of time.
But I didn’t feel like I had more resources for my own projects. I was still responding to any new ideas like this - “when would I ever have time for that?”
I spent most of my working time in focus periods, measuring them using the pomodoro method.
I was doing a lot, but I wasn’t doing it productively. Although all work tasks were moving forward, almost all of my projects looked as if they were standing still. I didn’t have time to regularly write a blog, think through and develop my side projects. I only had time to work, create new tasks for myself, study software engineering, and do something else in bits and pieces.
The problem turned out to be that I wasn’t trying to specifically ask myself the question - “where am I spending my time” and honestly find an answer to it.
The answer came through primary metrics. How do you collect these metrics?
Track time.
Wait. But wasn’t I measuring the time I spent on work? Yes, I was, but the goal wasn’t to collect metrics and understand where, what I’m actually spending time on, but simply to stop overworking.
And I achieved this goal, but didn’t achieve an overall improvement in productivity and quality of work across all my areas.
I filled all the other time (outside of work) with tasks that I managed to grab from the first or second priorities of my todo list.
Everything changed when I became familiar with the idea about the importance of primary metrics, the importance of grounding any ideas and theories in reality.
In fact, the applied methodology of productivity and work organization is not so important. It’s not important in the sense that there are many such methodologies, and different methodologies are well suited to different people.
But no methodology will work properly if you don’t realize what you’re actually working with, what’s really happening? How much work and resources are being spent? How productive is it in terms of progress toward the result?
Our most valuable resource is time, and in order to take a step into a more productive future, you need to understand where you’re spending this resource. Then you can choose whatever methods you like (or even develop your own) and use them effectively.
Perhaps you’re already scared now, and you have thoughts like this - “it’s absolute madness to track every activity by the hour! I’ll go crazy, I’ll just waste more time constantly recording these time intervals!”
You’re absolutely right – just trying to track where you spend your time without a system is difficult, will cause a lot of stress, and might be the opposite of the idea of efficiency.
That’s why I’m writing this guide article for you.
Time categorization system
Today I’m offering you a categorization system that will help you collect metrics without much effort.
Good news:
- It’s not difficult; you already have everything you need to get started
- You don’t need to mark the time minute by minute, and you probably won’t be able to. A drift of 15-30 minutes is more than acceptable to begin with
- I’m not suggesting you become a productivity maniac and track time for the rest of your life (this is an optional habit, and you’re free to decide in the future whether you need it or not)
Bad news:
- You’ll have to work independently with what you discover. I’m not giving you a fish, but a fishing rod.
As you can see - there seems to be more good news, right? :)
First-class abstraction
A good abstraction in software engineering is one that generalizes rather than specifies.
So, to get closer to a breakthrough in productivity, I suggest you try tracking how much time in your life you spend, divided into the following categories:
- Productive time
- Investment time
- Body maintenance
- Everyday life and rest
- Time wasted
Let’s understand what these categories are.
Productive time
Productive time is time you spent on focused work on specific tasks (like work tickets from a Kanban board). This is time spent on tasks that bring you closer to achieving some already outlined, planned, and specific goal. For example, strategic planning can also be included here - because it’s aimed at moving somewhere, it’s clear which direction to “dig,” we actually have a task like “Research X to understand how to do Z for project Y.”
Investment time
This is time you spend on self-education, general research work (searching for new ideas and opportunities), or on your side projects.
Investment time is called that - not only because learning and research are truly investments in your future but also because in case of urgent need, this time can be “sacrificed” in favor of productive time to complete a project or deal with some work emergencies.
Body maintenance
Sleep, food (quick preparation, but not fast food). Normal food that can be prepared and consumed in a reasonable time, not 2-3 hours. If you decided to prepare a lavish dinner for a celebration in the middle of the week - such time is more related to “Everyday life and rest.”
In general, the body maintenance category can be omitted from time tracking altogether, especially at the beginning, or if you have other monitoring sources (smartwatch/bracelet).
But we’ll come back to this.
Everyday life and rest
Everyday life and rest are all activities related to maintaining the home, paperwork, taking/picking up a child from kindergarten, and other routines.
Perhaps this category will be the first candidate for finding “time wasted.” Well, or at least you’ll have something to grab onto and start asking yourself questions like “what was I doing here for SIX hours? What kind of everyday life is that?”
We should strive for a system where the everyday life and rest category is not used to plug holes in your schedule, except for emergencies like hospital visits, or household chores that cannot be rescheduled from the middle of the work schedule to another time.
It’s better not to mix productive and investment time with other activities because, according to Kahneman, the brain takes quite a long time to get into slow thinking - 20 minutes! This means if you work on a difficult intellectual task using the pomodoro method, you’ll just be warming up during the first pomodoro! It’s not very productive to jump up and go on errands after that.
You can start by tracking in this category all the time that doesn’t fall under all other categories.
Be vigilant, “all other” means including the one below!
Time wasted
This category is for time that you “invested” in nonsense that brings you nothing (or almost nothing) useful in the long run.
By default, it’s not assumed to deliberately spend time (for hours) on nonsense. This category is rather designed for rewriting blocks of time (in whole or in part) from productive or investment time, during which we worked inefficiently or were distracted.
Of course, it’s also worth considering a scenario where you’re in a position of personal growth, where you’re already aware that you’re wasting time on nonsense, but this nonsense is so pleasant to you and allows you to seemingly rest well that you can’t get rid of it yet. This is normal! No judgment!
In this case, you can purposefully spend time on nonsense, so that later in the context of the week you can see how much goes there. Perhaps such a metric will help you stop doing this nonsense.
In general, it’s entirely your subjective matter to determine what is nonsense for you and what is everyday life/routine/rest. The topic of quality rest is a candidate for a separate article, subscribe!
Practical implementation of the system
How to use this and what to do with it?
The categories presented above are a starting point, a framework on which I suggest you build your own approach to measuring your real time expenditures.
Here is a key point about composure and mindfulness.
Measuring metrics by itself gives almost nothing; you need to have a goal, and after collection, analyze these metrics.
The goal can be formulated very simply, for example - “I want to manage to do more!”, or more specifically “I want to stop spending so much time on nonsense”, or even “I want to find time to start doing X”, where X can be anything - learning a new profession, or pursuing a hobby.
Tools for collecting time metrics
Here, for example, is what a report looks like in my chosen time tracker for the week:
32 hours on Saturday is certainly a lot!
I definitely remind you again - you don’t have to be a time tracking maniac if you don’t like it / don’t need it / find it difficult. Look, I even have some errors here, that’s normal!
Maniacal tracking by too detailed categories exhausted me literally in a couple of days; eventually, I started using general categories, even for rest.
It’s important to say again about composure, about mindfulness - to the extent of understanding, be honest with yourself when tracking Rest / Everyday life. You must ruthlessly catch yourself trying to infiltrate obvious nonsense into any category other than the “nonsense category”!
If it’s difficult for you here too, resort to studying metrics, for example, screen time, which, as far as I know, all modern smartphones collect in a convenient format.
If you see in the metrics that you spend a lot of time on nonsense - this is very important, that’s exactly what we’re looking for here! We’re interested in how things are in reality, remember? So record everything honestly!
On my graph, it’s clear that Investment Time is more than Productive. Does this mean that I worked on tasks for 7 hours a week? No, investment time consists almost entirely of research tasks.
And of course, I couldn’t have tracked all this if the process wasn’t convenient.
Not an advertisement at all - I use free
toggl. There are web, desktop, and mobile clients that synchronize normally, and as you can see in the screen above - you can build a pretty convenient categorization by “projects”.
But why so little Wasted Time? Why do I need to track time if I’m already a productivity cyborg? No! Not a cyborg!
As I’ve already said - before I started collecting these metrics, I had no time for any projects… Time tracking didn’t help me spend less time on nonsense; time tracking helped me understand that I have problems with focus! And with focus not in terms of distraction to social networks, but with overloading myself with too many parallel tasks! We’ll talk about this further.
But for now, let’s get back to tracking.
The good news is that you already have everything to start tracking time. You definitely have a clock somewhere, even if you have a prehistoric button phone in your pocket.
If you’re an active gadget user, even better! You can choose from dozens, if not hundreds (if not thousands!) of applications for time tracking, with pomodoro, todo lists, and the like.
But don’t rush! Maybe you already have too many such applications; more on this later.
Just choose and start! Follow only the basic provisions of the framework and adapt it to yourself.
Let’s outline an action plan:
- Set a goal for yourself, give yourself a clear “direction” - why are you doing this at all.
- Figure out convenient category names for you, as long as they follow the general idea of division described above.
- Choose a way to start collecting metrics - an application on your phone, a notebook for handwriting, anything!
- Collect metrics for at least 7 days in a row
- Analyze the result
- Find oddities, inconveniences, improve categories if necessary, and repeat the collection of metrics.
Instead of one week, you can collect metrics for two, or a whole month. If you suddenly find it simple and natural to start tracking time constantly in one format or another - don’t be scared, you’re not a maniac! Go ahead!
In any case, once you find a system that’s comfortable for you, it will be very useful to conduct such a weekly audit of your productivity at least once a quarter, or once every six months.
It’s also possible that after two such measurements, you’ll feel that you never need them again, you’ve understood everything, and you’ve “ramped up” into effective and mindful work throughout life. Great, if you don’t want to measure anymore - don’t measure!
Just don’t forget about such a wonderful mechanism; perhaps it will come in handy when you start working on a new project, or get a new job, and suddenly find yourself overly tired and buried under a mountain of endless tasks, which are all urgent and needed to be done “yesterday.”
The temptation to fall into specifications
At some point, an excellent thought may visit you - why don’t I start monitoring my time in more detail?
For example - here I seem to be staying in the recommended categories, but I’ll record how much time I spent working on project A, how much on calls for project B, how much time I ran on the treadmill, how much I worked with weight, how much time I spent preparing a salad, and how much I cooked borsch.
Although sometimes such detail can help - for example, I found that sometimes I got stuck in the shower for 20 minutes - there’s still a strong risk of getting confused, falling into excessive details, overcomplicating the process.
I suggest sticking to the most generalized categories.
Understand, you don’t need to know how much total time per week you spend preparing salads. Your main task is to find out as accurately as possible how much time you actually work and how much time you actually spend on nonsense.
From these metrics, you can delve into questions like “why so many tasks? Are they all really urgent and relevant?”, or “why so many calls? Is it true that they’re all productive…?”, and so on.
You can always go into any detail, as long as the metrics are collected at all. And it’s by no means certain (rather the opposite) that it will actually benefit you to track time separately for each work task. That’s madness.
Depending on your main activity and lifestyle, the proposed categories may seem too general or not quite correct.
It’s perfectly normal to slightly specify or rename them. For example, your categories might look like this:
- Writing blog articles (investment time)
- Writing code / solving work routine (productive time)
- Learning (investment time)
- Exercising (everyday life and rest)
- Reading books / articles / blogs (everyday life and rest)
- Doing nonsense (Nonsense!)
Or like this:
- Working on client projects (productive time)
- Studying new trends and design tools (investment time)
- Creating works for portfolio (investment time)
- Household chores and personal life (everyday life and rest)
- Aimless scrolling of social networks (time wasted)
Note that in both of these examples, I completely omitted tracking body maintenance, and that’s perfectly normal.
If you have a fitness bracelet or some kind of smartwatch that tracks how much you sleep, then consider that you already have a metric about sleep.
Pay attention to the quality of your sleep and rest! If you don’t sleep, then no tracking will save you!
Meals and their preparation may naturally be visible in the calendar or between records of time spent, so they can also be omitted (just make sure that lunch doesn’t turn into scrolling news/TikTok for another 40 minutes on top.)
As you can see - there’s plenty of space!
The main thing is that your categories follow the division into productive and investment time, healthy routine and everyday life, and finally a category for nonsense.
The Nonsense category is needed even if you’re super successful and mindful and don’t spend more than 30 minutes a week on nonsense. Just by stopping to even consider that such a category exists, you’re already giving nonsense more chances to seep into your life.
From collecting metrics to action
Analysis of the data obtained
Analyzing the collected metrics is a slightly more complex process.
When you start measuring time, you’ll have the opportunity to study the proportions of your time investments across days or, even more effectively, an entire week.
However, the numbers themselves won’t give much — in parallel, it’s necessary to develop the ability to work qualitatively and rationally directly at the moment of performing tasks.
This means increasing the level of composure and efficiency in each work session, which, combined with the analysis of time metrics, will give results.
This is exactly the reason why I included mentions of TODO lists and pomodoro practice in this article in the Primary Metrics section (and other places).
If you don’t start developing your composure in the moment, you’ll have nothing to record in wasted time.
I’d like to tell you that you can neglect composure, but unfortunately, that’s not the case. You need some additional mechanism that will help you determine what time was wasted and what wasn’t. And the main mechanism here is your responsible attentiveness to your own life activity.
Let’s look at a couple of examples of how to determine time wasted in vain. It sounds simpler than it might seem.
For example, you have a scheduled zoom call with colleagues. If the call was productive, in the sense that 2/3 wasn’t small talk, and after the end of the call, it became clear what to do next. This understanding is expressed purely in the subjective feeling of “we agreed about X, now I need to do A and B”, against which there is simultaneously a rather bright and terribly vague feeling of “What were we talking about? Why did we gather? What should I do next, huh?”
If you catch yourself on option 2 - boldly record the time of such calls as wasted.
Right now, you probably don’t have almost any mechanisms to influence the regularity and quality of such calls, especially if you’re an individual contributor, not an operational manager. A large number of such “vague” calls is a serious indicator of problems with processes and probably overall productivity in the organization, so I can only suggest that you focus on areas where you can manage your time, and subscribe to me, as I will definitely continue to write about productivity and systems thinking.
Another example. Let’s say you’ve decided that, like me, you’re comfortable working on tasks using the pomodoro method to fight distractions - we turn on the timer and for 25 minutes, no TikTok!
If you really didn’t get distracted - excellent! The pomodoro goes into productive or investment time depending on the work you were doing. Now you can space out for five minutes, or rest well :)
If you did get distracted, and significantly so, for example, you read emails for five minutes or more - this is definitely time wasted. I prefer to send all 25 minutes to the “trash,” which is both cruel and simpler than cutting out 5-8 minutes from a pomodoro. Besides - then during analysis, these blocks will attract your attention and you’ll be able to reflect better.
From metrics to action: task management
Now that we’ve figured out how to collect time metrics, the logical question is what to do with the freed-up time and how to organize your tasks.
After all, the ultimate goal of collecting metrics is not just to know where time goes, but to learn how to use it more effectively.
And here lurks a terrible devil.
Have you ever caught yourself having 500 interesting articles you want to read, and 48 projects you really want to start doing? While 10 of them are already in progress.
Please remember my story, which I wrote at the beginning of the article - in the previous year, I almost didn’t waste time on nonsense, I worked a lot. But I didn’t become more productive. Therefore, in addition to collecting metrics, you also need to learn focus, concentration on what’s important, concrete matter.
There are also a bunch of methods for this, but I’ll suggest you simply think and show rationalism. When you start collecting metrics and figure out where you’re spending time, this will be especially useful if you suddenly find yourself in the same situation I was in - buried under a pile of tasks, multiple projects, and so on.
First - throw away all the tools you’re already using, keep only one. Paper planner, todo application, obsidian with some plugin where there’s a calendar and daily tasks - choose something that will be convenient for you or at least seem convenient (you can always change).
But don’t go crazy; for tasks, you need one tool. Or at worst - one for work, another for all personal projects for purely logical separation.
If you’ve been using multiple applications, then looking a little closer, it will become clear what you really used - in one of them there will be the most tasks, notes, visible activity. Great - that’s it. It’s already convenient for you.
Now clean your planner of garbage that steals your attention and time.
Perhaps, like me, you started at some point to use the todo list as a repository for notes, reading lists, and so on.
REMOVE EVERYTHING from your TODO list that doesn’t relate to tasks you’re currently working on - work and your projects, it doesn’t matter. Leave only what you can’t remove, something that’s already somehow in progress, or is about to be taken into work and can’t be canceled anymore.
There are two possible scenarios here:
- You threw out all the garbage and everything became crystal clear; it turns out everything isn’t so bad, and you only have 1-2 projects in progress, and you were only wasting time on nonsense
- And more likely - Everything is terrible, you have 4-5 or more projects simultaneously, and a bunch of small tasks that logically don’t relate to any projects but take away a lot of your resources.
So, for those who found themselves in the second scenario - consider each of your tasks, and ask yourself a specific question:
-
What is this task, to which project does it belong? Is it clear at all what it is and when it needs to be done? If not - then you forgot to throw away some reminder or note that has no place in a TODO list. Do it!
-
If it’s still a clear task, then ask yourself what its essence is, what benefit and to whom will it bring - what will it affect in the real world? How well is it worked out? Does it really need to be dealt with right now?
-
Congratulations, you’ve either identified a valuable task, or found garbage again. There’s still a chance that you’re looking at something potentially useful - send it to the archive or some watch later on YouTube. The main thing is to clear up the planner.
Focus – that very composure
Okay, we’ve got a clearer understanding of where our time goes and how to organize tasks. But there’s one more critically important element, a universal tool of productivity in any business - the ability to focus.
Without this skill, even the most accurate metrics and perfectly organized task lists won’t bring the desired result.
I have good news for you! If you’ve read to this point without scrolling and in one sitting - you probably have good focus! The main thing is to clear out the garbage and collect metrics :)
Multitasking is a myth. It’s not the path to success; it’s the path to nowhere.
You need to learn to concentrate ON ONE thing, at every moment of time and on any scale.
Note that throughout this article, I’ve repeatedly mentioned the word composure. Your quality and composed attention is insanely important always, at any stage when we start to live purposefully, not just somehow.
Without composure, everything will always be “just somehow”
This may sound too stupid, but the longer you concentrate on one thing, the more results you’ll achieve.
I’m not suggesting you necessarily concentrate on one thing for your entire life, but that’s also an option. Imagine if you choose the meaning of your life - knitting scarves and hats. Every day you learn to knit, becoming better and better.
But that doesn’t mean you’ll only knit.
For example, at some point, you might want to knit for family and friends, and then it comes to mind to start earning from this - take it for sale.
And here you seem to have one goal and one business, but now “side quests” appear like:
- Learn marketing
- Develop a personal brand
- Set up social media
And so on, but globally - the goal is one.
Many people for this reason jump from one thing to another, can’t find themselves. Because they didn’t set any of their undertakings as a goal, didn’t plan to thoroughly try and understand whether they need it or not, but started doing something in an emotional impulse inspired by others’ opinions.
The point is that concrete goal setting is also a skill from the category of composure.
And nevertheless, if you’ve chosen something more complex than knitting, for example, an engineering career - there can be many sub-goals that you can spend your whole life on.
That’s why it’s especially important to focus on one thing.
One brain definitely won’t be enough for this, in the sense of the brain itself. That’s why I’m telling this whole story about metrics - we need to constantly be reinforced by breadcrumbs from reality, so as not to forget what and why we’re doing, where and why we’re going, and who we are in general.
If you don’t know at all what you need, regardless of how old you are - just start consciously choosing things and trying to do them, until you get bored, until you start understanding that you don’t get satisfaction from what you’re doing.
Just try, the main thing is to start doing at least something!
The secret is that by focusing on something for a week-two-month, you’ll still learn something useful - it won’t be wasted. At the very least, you can learn composure! :)
The main thing - stop wasting your life on complete nonsense and terrible dispersion!
Okay, it’s time to finish this lyrical digression.
Why it’s so hard for us to concentrate
The modern world creates unprecedented conditions in which it’s increasingly difficult for our brain to maintain concentration.
First, we’ve evolved so that we can effectively process a limited amount of information. But modern technologies create a data flow that causes terrible cognitive overload, making it difficult to process and remember important information.
That’s why your attention is truly invaluable resource, second in value only to time. And it should also be treated precisely as a resource, for a very simple reason - attention and time are very closely linked!
Second, multitasking is a disgusting myth. The brain cannot process multiple tasks simultaneously. Instead, it quickly switches between them, which requires significant energy expenditure and reduces work efficiency. With each such switch, we not only sag in productivity but also increase the probability of errors.
Third, the problem with dopamine. Notifications and social networks exploit the brain’s dopamine reward system; this is also no secret. These things are literally created in such a way as to rob you - steal your attention!
Each new notification causes a small surge of dopamine, which creates an addiction to constant small “rewards” and disaccustoms us from the long concentration necessary for deep work. The endless feed is generally a complete mess about which I don’t even want to talk.
The constant flow of information leads to brain burnout. Symptoms include:
- Deficit of composure/attention - very difficult to concentrate on one task
- Decision-making paralysis (even simple ones)
- Dependence on technology to perform basic cognitive tasks - for example, a person doesn’t even try to add 17+8 in their mind and immediately reaches for a phone calculator
- Chronic stress and anxiety
- Sleep disturbance - seems like you didn’t drink coffee, and you’re physically tired as a horse, but it’s very hard to fall asleep
Recognizing all these signals and problems is the first step to restoring control over your attention (and life!)
The good news is that time tracking and developing awareness about where your concentration is really going can help with this trouble.
There are other useful practices that can help with attention training, but the article is already too long, so I’ll tell about them another time.
And besides - I sincerely believe that grounding in metrics, which we’re considering today, can give enough impetus for you to start solving this problem yourself (if it exists). Awareness, knowledge about the catastrophe won’t let you close your eyes further.
I hope you haven’t chickened out.
Conclusion:
We’ve examined three keys to real productivity:
- Collecting primary time metrics through a simple categorization system;
- Effectively organizing tasks in a single space;
- Developing the ability to focus on one thing until it’s completed.
Collect metrics! I believe you can do it!
This article turned out very large, and perhaps a bit chaotic in places, because the topic is simultaneously very important and very extensive. And too… personal! Because I experienced a qualitative leap in productivity when I discovered my specific problems - task overload.
Without time tracking, I wouldn’t have seen what was already in the most visible place. So if I could force you to take away at least something from this article, at least one thought, I would force you to remember not about time categorization, but about grounding in reality.
Please, don’t live exclusively in your head!
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