using time tracking to manage time

January 14, 2026

I've used RescueTime at nearly every job I've had since I started tech writing. My first-ever tech writing manager used it as a tool to micromanage the interns (I even had to log bathroom breaks). That didn't sour me on time tracking, though. Time tracking is beautiful. Time tracking creates useful data I can use to inform (or defend) choices I make at work. Time tracking helps me meet my goals and it also can help me assuage guilt I sometimes get about work that doesn't have a deliverable I can proudly announce in Slack.

As technical writers, many of us are constantly trying to prove that we're not a cost center. I know how this goes, and it took me a long time to dial in how I do my reporting so I'm able to keep an eye on what is wasting my time and where I can get more efficient. In this post, I'll explain how I use time tracking, ticket tracking, and Claude together to get insights into where my work hours go, and how much a deliverable "costs".

what you need

To get started with this, you'll need some data. If you don't already have the data you need, this may end up being a long term project for you work toward -- it'll probably come in handy for your next performance review, though.

Here's what I use:

• Time tracking data. Whether it's from RescueTime, a spreadsheet, or some other time tracking tool. I love RescueTime because I can tag offline time, track window titles, and I can get really granular with my categories and what I consider productive, neutral, and distracting activities.
• Ticket/work item/issue tracking with reporting. I tag the everliving crap out of my issues so I can slice and dice effort points by feature area, product manager, deliverable types, and so on. If you don't already have a strategy in place for this, I recommend you get one.
• An LLM chat, or maybe you're already a business analyst or really good with pivot tables and stuff. In that case, use Excel -- your call. I used Claude.ai because I'm indifferent toward Excel at this stage in my career and I don't enjoy it enough to make the struggle and time spent feel like a worthy endeavor.

what to do

When you have the data you need and the interpretation tool of your choice, dump the data into the tool. I upload my data mostly in csv format to Claude.ai (the basic chat interface), and use it to interpret the data and surface patterns I might have missed. RescueTime keeps a pretty good accounting of my time spent in each app, so I'm able to do things like ask Claude to compare my time spent in Zoom with my ticket velocity for that same quarter (surprise, time-in-Zoom and ticket velocity have an inverse relationship for me).

Where I think this is even more powerful for me is quarterly or yearly reporting -- pulling the numbers for each period and then comparing them with the following period's outputs. Here's an example: In Q1, I spent 40 hours in Zoom, and I closed 120 total effort points. 80 of those effort points were for internal tooling to help support automating manual processes. In Q2 I spent 80 hours in Zoom meetngs (double over Q1) and closed 100 effort points, mostly for learning maps and developer experience tools. It looks like my ticket velocity went down in Q2, but it's because I was able to pivot to more strategic work because I'd spent three months automating processes.

Note: I'm using fake stats in this post, I might melt if I spent 80 hours in Zoom in a single quarter, ha.

what next

One fun part of being a tech writer is that most of the data-driven teams and initiatives don't really know what to make of us and what we do. This is also terrifying cause it means it's hard to know what "productive" and "good" look like -- feels like we're getting graded without a rubric. Anyway, start tracking your time spent against your outputs, it might give you actionable insights or even get you more teammates or a better-balanced workload!

The sky's the limit, writer. Here are some fun ideas:

• Track how much time you're spending in Slack trying to follow up on a single project, compare it with the ticket effort.
• Track how many hours you spend writing project updates. Implement a daily/weekly rollup routine (maybe my next post?) and see if you spend less time writing updates.
• Figure out how much ticket velocity each extra hour of meetings costs you, use it to make a case for more head count (or a meeting reckoning).
• Use it to see how efforts spent on clearing up tech debt or building new tooling impact your team's output the next quarter.

Remember, businesses like numbers. It behooves you to figure out your own numbers before someone else tries to do it for you.