Introduction

Every Sunday night at 9pm, I used to do something I called "time archaeology."

I'd open my laptop, stare at a blank spreadsheet, and try to reconstruct what I had done across four clients over the previous five days. Calendar. Slack history. Git commits. Browser history. Sometimes a sketchbook on my desk if I'd been wireframing.

It took 60-90 minutes. Every week. And the time I logged at the end of it was — at best — a guess.

This post is about what that guessing actually costs, and how I stopped doing it.

The Pain Point Most Freelancers Don't Name

If you log time at the end of the day or end of the week, you are not tracking time. You are reconstructing it. And reconstruction has three problems:

It's lossy. You forget the 15-minute call on Tuesday where you walked the client through a bug.…