The tools are crap:

Excel is the most common. It is great for doing ad-hoc analysis which may be interesting but knowing was to analysis in a flood of hours is hard. Plus actually recording your hours is really hard.

There are other tools and I have tried most of them (as it would have been easier to use a tool than build my own!) but nothing worked for me. For each one I used, I started making a list and you can see them here but as a summary they tend to fit into a few groups:

• Timers - literally click a stop watch each time you change activities (but I kept forgetting!)
• Dashboards - connect to lots of things to get data and focus on showing it
• Timesheets - literally what businesses use for tracking hours to projects - most of the features were irrelevant or in the way
• Snoopers - they watch what you are doing on your devices and report on it. The detail was too much, meaning I would need to trawler through all the data to make sense of it.
• Counters - at the end you click yes or no if you did things.

I have tried almost all of them and still I struggled to apply it to do what I want — track everything I do in a day.

Problem with these tools:

• Access - Some are not good (or available) on mobile so tracking is painful
• Simple - While mobile apps may be available, actual logging of time can be challenging (typically requiring multiple inputs of start times and end times and more — all of which are not relevant to my use-case).
• Repetition - In my first year, I had to type the same 12 words 8760 times (the number of hours in a year). If I did 8 hours of the same stuff (sleep) I had to type 8 times. I do not want to do thisever again. Likewise 8 button clicks doesn’t sound appealing.
• Pressure - When using Toggl, I felt constantly under a timer even when I couldn’t see it.
• Forgetting - I need to build habits to do this. The app must give me a habit, not just be a tool to use when you remember, as you will forget.
• Too Specific - when it told me I had done 12 hours 42 minutes and 25 seconds of Exercise so far, I really don’t care.
• No fun - This should track my life, not bore it! I am not an accountant billing customers. There is the joy in remembering my time, of succeeding goals, of spending time properly, so where is that joy in these apps?

So I built my own

This is why I decided to learn JavaScript and build it myself. I fixed all of these points.

• Access - everyhour is a mobile and webapp so you can reach it from any device.
• Simple - you record by dragging time blocks - so there are no more forms!
• Repetition - you can record 8 hours in one swipe.
• Pressure - it is not pressuring as it is retroactive and self-reflective - encouraging you to review and improve consciously.
• Forgetting - I have added notifications to help prevent forgetting and have built the app to sit on your phones home page. It is still tricky but it is better than before!
• Too Specific - it isn't specific as the smallest chunk to record is 15 minutes.
• No fun - it is not laborous anymore - I truly get a kick out of dragging time and hitting my goals!

Get this superpower?

I started tracking with a spreadsheet. Feel free too. I built everyhour so that you don't have to. You can record easily on any device. You can customised it as much as you want, with as many categories as you want. You can view analytics on your time in one click.

You can sign up here: