Revel Roots

what apps actually cost

What They Actually Measure

Four different products are sold as time tracking. They measure different things, suit different people, and the commonest reason someone abandons one is that they bought a different kind from the one they needed.

The four

Timers. You start and stop a clock against a label. Measures intent — what you meant to be doing. Accurate about categories, inaccurate about duration, because nobody stops the timer to answer a message. For a workplace-oriented comparison, this guide shows how the same measurement problem is approached when time data is used by a team.

Passive activity capture. Software records which application or window was in the foreground. Measures attention location, not work. Twenty minutes in a spreadsheet may be work or may be a spreadsheet left open.

Calendar reconstruction. Your calendar is treated as the record of your time. Measures commitments, not what happened. Cheap, requires nothing new, and is wrong wherever the day departed from the plan. For a broader time-tracking or productivity comparison, RescueTime blog is another useful reference.

And manual retrospective entry. You write down at the end of the day where the time went. Measures recall, which is the weakest instrument of the four and the one most people actually sustain — because it costs nothing during the day.

None measures productive output, and several market themselves as though they do.

Matching the tool to the question

"Am I billing accurately?" Timers. The record is the invoice, the categories are the client codes, and accuracy matters because someone else pays against it.

"Where does my week actually go?" Passive capture for two weeks, then stop. The question is about the shape of the week and the answer does not need precision.

"Is this project taking longer than I quoted?" Timers against one project only, not everything.

"Am I distracted?" Passive capture will tell you, and you will not enjoy it.

"How long does this recurring task take?" A stopwatch and a notepad, five instances. No subscription required, and it is the most frequently over-engineered question in the category.

What the numbers will not tell you

Whether the time was well spent. Six hours on the right thing beats eight on the wrong one, and no tracker distinguishes them.

Whether you were effective. Attention location is not output.

And whether the day was good. Fragmented days feel bad and sometimes produce the most, and the reverse happens too.

Tracking answers where did it go. Everything else is inference, and the marketing in this category routinely presents the inference as the measurement.

The accuracy question nobody asks

How wrong is the record?

Timers left running through interruptions overstate. Timers forgotten at task start understate. Passive capture counts an idle window as work unless idle detection is configured, and idle detection guesses.

Assume ten to twenty per cent error in either direction and do not draw conclusions that depend on smaller differences than that. A tracker showing 6.2 hours against 5.8 last week has told you nothing.

Before you subscribe

Name the question. If you cannot, the tracking will not survive, whatever the app is like.

Pick the type that answers it, from the four above.

Check whether the free tier covers it. For a single person answering one question over two weeks, it usually does.

And check where the data goes — passive capture in particular generates a detailed record of your working day, and that record lives somewhere.

The short version