What time logging gives me: more confident decisions, and salaries cut by up to 10×

My experience will be useful to people who often say “I never get anything done” or “I don't have time for this.” These are the words someone uses to explain to themselves why they're ineffective. How do you eliminate that ineffectiveness? How do you work out exactly what to change in what you do? Here's how I answered those questions and lifted my team's productivity.

When I introduced time logging, I started to understand better who's doing what in the company, and I stopped pouring budgets down the drain. I began saving my own money and my clients' money. As a result, income grew.

If you're after a quick answer, here it is: you need to measure results and analyse them

Without measuring results, you can't improve them. You can't improve a metric whose value you don't know. So when someone says they can't get something done, the first thing to understand is why that's happening. Without measurement, that's impossible to understand.

A simple example. One runner laps the track 10 seconds faster than another. The coach looks at the result and sees who has the better chance of finishing first. If he records the time across the lap, he'll see where the runner loses pace and where they make it up — and it becomes clear exactly what to do to run the lap faster.

How it all started

Time logging is one way to measure results. In our team it matters a lot, because it shows a person's output rate. It isn't the only measure of an employee's effectiveness, of course — we always look at how many tasks were done and which ones. But the ratio of effort to the result achieved in that time is an important measure of how effective someone is as a team member.

When we first decided to introduce time logging in the business, I tracked tasks alongside everyone else. Now I record my working hours regularly and precisely. My initial motivation was to set a personal example for the team. Then I got into it.

At first it was hard to log every task. A year went by. It's still hard, but the results spur me on.

What a year of logging achieved

As a leader, I started making decisions more confidently. I now make them not subjectively, but on the basis of analytics, which shows the result — and what each person is worth — without emotion.

When I began discussing their ineffectiveness with employees, they agreed that they often sit idle and procrastinate. With some, we had to part ways. But more often people agreed to a fair reduction in salary, or to move from a fixed salary to piecework. The most striking example: one employee's pay dropped tenfold without any effect on the result.

We also learned to measure and estimate the cost of a project more accurately. There are fewer and fewer cases where we estimated a project at one number of hours and in reality spent far more. The efficiency and profitability of the business keep growing.

Useful time-logging apps

To organise my working day I use several apps:

• Jira — the CRM where we run all our work projects.

• RescueTime — tracks the time spent in various applications and, on that basis, helps assess how productively you're working.

• TimeBro — records everything I do on the computer. Logging with it is a pleasure: just review the event log, recall what exactly you were doing and how many hours and minutes it took, and enter the data into Jira (you can record down to the second, but that's already paranoia).

• Focus — a mobile app that helps maintain discipline using the Pomodoro principle.

P.S. I told my daughter about the Pomodoro principle at work:

• Work for 15–25 minutes without being distracted by anything.

• Take a 3–5 minute break.

• After 3–4 such cycles, take a 15–30 minute break.

Now it helps her focus and finish her tasks faster. All that's left is to use the tool with discipline. If I don't remind my daughter, she won't work in Pomodoro mode. That applies to all adults: if you follow the recommendations, they deliver results — but we're often too lazy to.

How to log time

My favourite author, Peter Drucker, devoted a small part of a chapter to time logging in his book “The Effective Executive.” Following his advice, every manager ought to measure their time twice a year. The book contains an exercise that lets you free up a quarter of your working time.

Drucker's argument, in essence: an effective executive records how they spend their time for three to four weeks at a stretch, at least twice a year, and redraws their schedule after each review. Six months later, the next review always reveals the same “drift” back toward unimportant tasks. Skill at managing time improves with practice, but only deliberate effort keeps unproductive time to a minimum. The next step toward greater effectiveness, he says, is systematic time management: identify the least productive activities and get rid of them wherever you can.

I strive to be an effective manager. I try to log all the time I devote to work in Jira — even if I went to an embassy to sort out corporate documents (I don't record travel time).

At the same time, I don't track how long I sat in the corporate messenger (we use Slack). The reason is simple: if I'm communicating too much in Slack, it means I'm a fool who can't give his staff proper instructions, and they have to spend time on extra clarifications.

But I do record half an hour if I spend it cheering up an employee who's buried in work, or tired, or frustrated by the chaos of the outside world.

If the week was very hard and hectic, recording everything every day is tough — so I log the time at the end of the week. If everything is stable and I'm moving to plan, I assess the work done daily. I try to write out how long each task took. This helps me put together a clear plan.

Analysing the results

Every day I measure effectiveness through RescueTime, as the ratio of logged time to time spent. I check in there and make sure effectiveness is rising.

I also work a lot. In February I logged 300 working hours. After that, effectiveness started to drop sharply, and emotional burnout and family problems set in. For me, a drop in effectiveness is a signal that I need to step away from work and rest.

I did a deep analysis of my working time just once, when I wanted to take on a big project. It required a lot of my personal involvement, and we wanted to assess whether we had the resources to take it on without losing quality on the projects we already had.

There's no point doing this kind of effectiveness assessment often. You might need it if you're changing your line of work. The main goal is to understand exactly what your time goes on, and how much: which projects, and which operational activities.

Conclusion

Time logging is a great tool for boosting effectiveness. With it, I started making business decisions more confidently, wasted fewer budgets, and built a team around me that works for results.

If it feels like you can't get things done:

1. Measure where your time actually goes.

2. Look at the results.

3. Work out where hours and minutes go unproductively.

If I've logged 35+ hours by the end of the week, I've done a great job. If I recorded 20 hours, I worked too little.

That said, it's important to analyse effort together with RescueTime. If effectiveness is 75–80% at the end of the day, I gave it my all and stayed focused. If it's below 70%, I idled a lot — probably burned out, or didn't warm up my mind properly, and I need to take a couple of days off to recover.

This kind of analysis helps keep me in good shape. Life becomes more understandable and controllable. Thanks to logging, you know what your day went on — and you know it was productive.

Logging is a matter of discipline. Someone who can't log regularly most likely isn't in control of their time, has no clear plan for the day or week, and sometimes simply has nothing to record because of procrastination. They don't understand whether the week went well or badly. More often than not, they waste their time.

If you're disciplined enough and ready to put into practice everything written above, I'm sure the results will come. If you found this useful, take a look at my other articles — I publish some here and some on other platforms. To avoid missing anything, follow my page on social media, where I post all the announcements.