50 hours and 222 hours are both true
My time tracker shows two different numbers for the same data. The gap is the interesting part.
My time tracker shows two numbers for the same span of work.
The daily widget says 50 hours this month. The lifetime view says 222 hours since February. Same tool, same data underneath, two different sums.
I find this kind of disagreement more useful than either number on its own.
Why the gap exists
The daily widget adds up what I tracked, day by day, and includes the manual entries I added after the fact for offline work. It is the version of the truth that says “this is what showed up on the calendar.”
The lifetime view is stricter. It comes from an annual report export, weights time differently across categories the SDK cannot attribute directly, and excludes most of the manual-add layer. It is the version that says “this is what the camera saw.”
Both are true. Neither is wrong. They just answer different questions.
What the data confirms about my year
The lifetime view tells me roughly what happened, month by month: a heavy February, a fading March, a fully off-laptop April, and a restart in May. February was scoping and building one project end to end. By March the activation tax of opening the tracker after every task overtook me, and I stopped checking it most days. April I was in transit and off-screen for stretches long enough that no tracker would have caught me anyway. May I sat down at a new desk on the 14th, opened the tool first thing, and the chart restarted.
Two months on, one month fading, one month off, reactivated. That is the actual shape, not the one I would have told you from memory.
The honest part
Most of what I want to say about my own focus is half wrong. I round up the good weeks and I round down the empty ones. I describe a month from the day I remember best, not the average. The tracker does none of that.
The trade is that the tracker also does not know what kind of work I was doing. Fourteen hours in front of a screen can be deep work, or it can be the kind of presence that looks like work and is not. The bar on the chart treats them the same.
So I use the data the way I would use a witness who saw the room but not the meaning. It tells me where I was. It does not tell me whether I was any good.
That is enough. The chart is the part I cannot argue with. Everything else is interpretation, and the interpretation is mine to do.
What the two numbers are for
The 50-hour number is for the question “how am I tracking this month?” The 222-hour number is for the question “what is the shape of my year?” The gap between them is for the question “what kind of measurement do I actually trust?”
I keep the tracker open because I trust the chart more than I trust myself.
For the underlying methodology and a current breakdown, the /work page has both views side by side.
The tracker is Rize, the automatic time tracker I keep open all day. If you want the same chart for your own work, that is the one I use.