Comparing Time Management Tools

It's been a while since I've been able to write (much longer than I wanted to at the start of this year). Upon reflection, I always knew why this would be challenging for me: I just suck at consistent time management. Plain and simple.

We can get into why this is the case, and how I might be able to reflect on a relatively lawless childhood made me the chaos monkey I grew up to be, but that' doesn't really bring much value. I'm here to solve my problem of today and of the future, not to dwell on a past I can't change. The past is, however, great for ideas - ideas for how the solution for today and the future could be. So let's touch on those ideas, or rather, the

In my happenings, I've found that in order to be successful, you need to be productive. And in order to be productive, you need to remove distractions. And in order to know the difference between productive work, distractions, and the frequent yak-shaving, you need to know how you're spending your time.

Success = Productive = No Distractions

Be it "measure twice cut once", or "If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend the first six of them sharpening my axe", whichever quote you fiend

Part of the problem is the lack of visibility into actual time spend in the digital world. So I took the time today to look into some tools that could help collect this data. More concretely, the problem I'm trying to solve:

How can I see where I've spent my time retroactively?

There's a lot of ways we could go about this, but we're going to limit this tracking to the digital world.

The goal of Screen Time, I'd argue, is not for productivity, but instead to visualize your screen habits and your (probably unhealthy) relationship with your devices. That's great and all, but I care about the time I have to be on my screen slangin' code, researching articles, and figuring out how to do that backflip I said I was going to do 2 decades ago. On top of that, Screen Time doesn't let you go deep - it can't tell you how much time you were working on your Google Doc in Chrome, the workspace you were slingin' code in within VSCode, or what excel doc you were writing in. You will never know how much time you spend writing "My Sad Reality: 10 reasons why not eat 100 IKEA hot dogs in 1 sitting". But maybe that's for the better?

I'm pretty beholden to the Apple ecosystem, and, yes, Screen Time is a good tool made for this. The main challenge is that Screen Time isn't able to drill down into granular details of where you're spending time within an app, mainly for web browsers, vscode, etc. The challenge with this is that the But what screen time I've been playing around with time management tools now. It's