Even the notoriously uninhibited creatives can benefit from time tracking – be it for billing their clients or for improving their time management skills. But they have to be careful not to mix up time and results.

You can’t force creativity – and there is nothing worse for the artist than ...

This phase is characterised by excitement over the perceivably positive activity of time tracking, as well as overenthusiastic appreciation of any aesthetic solutions offered by the application. However, it is critical in this phase not to idolise the ticking timer – no matter how neat it looks. ...

For people with a wandering mind, the ticking timer seems to carry authority disproportional to its role. Getting stuck staring at the timer might force a false perspective that measuring time is more important than measuring results. It is not. Do your work first, check your stats later.

T...

Nothing brings the hammer down like a ticking timer on top of a blank page. While having sat for ages without doing anything might seem depressing, you can turn this around by acknowledging that sometimes you just need to drop what you’re doing and move on.

The lesson: when the timer hits 2...

If you fail to heed the warnings and push past the 20-minute mark, you’ll soon enter productivity twilight zone. Also known as the “what am I doing with my life” phase, it acts much like a black hole by crushing everything you enjoy about your work into a very unremarkable-lookin...