My “AI Time Tracker”

The System That Gives Me a Brutally Honest Report on Where My Time Went.

It started with a promise to my wife. “This weekend,” I said with the unearned confidence of a man who owns a label maker, “I will finally install that new smart lock.” It was a simple project. A Saturday morning job, tops.

The week began. Monday was a flurry of client calls. Tuesday turned into a technical writing project, trying to explain a complex API to a non-technical audience. Wednesday, I got sucked into a rabbit hole of debugging a new home automation script for my sprinklers. Thursday was a blur of emails and a last-minute proposal.

By Friday afternoon, I was exhausted. I’d been busy. My calendar looked like a game of Tetris played by a madman. I had answered dozens of emails, attended hours of meetings, and written thousands of words. I felt productive.

Then my wife walked into my office. “So, are you excited for your big smart lock project tomorrow?” she asked, smiling.

Oh shit.

The smart lock.

I had completely forgotten. I had spent 50 hours this week doing things, but the one tangible thing I had committed to doing for my family was completely untouched. My week had been a flurry of motion, but not necessarily progress. I had been busy, but had I been effective? I had no idea.

That feeling of treading water when your effort isn’t translating into forward momentum isn’t just uncomfortable; it’s terrifying. We feel this immense pressure to prove our value, to show that we’re not just “present,” but productive.

The problem is, we’re terrible judges of our own time. Our brains are liars. We remember the one hour of deep, focused work and forget the three hours we spent bouncing between Slack, email, and TikTok.

For years, the only solution was manual time-tracking. You’d get a fancy app or a spreadsheet and meticulously log every 15-minute increment of your day. I’ve tried it. I’ve failed at it. Every single time. It’s a tedious chore that adds more administrative work to an already-packed day.

No one sticks with it.

But what if we could get the benefit of a detailed time audit without the annoying work of creating one?

This system I built takes my messy, imperfect data from the week and turns it into a brutally honest, surprisingly insightful report. It’s the system that shows me the gap between what I think I did and where my time actually went.

It’s not a single prompt, but a simple, repeatable workflow. It’s the closest thing I’ve found to having a personal chief of staff, and it’s the system that ensures I don’t end another week with that sinking feeling of forgotten promises.

The Core Problem: You Can’t Manage What You Don’t Measure (But Measuring Sucks)

The goal isn’t to track every second. The goal is to understand the patterns. Most of our wasted time doesn’t come from one big distraction; it comes from a thousand tiny context switches. It’s what Cal Newport calls “shallow work.”

• Shallow Work: The logistical, non-cognitive tasks we do. Answering emails, scheduling meetings, formatting a document, responding to a quick Slack message. It feels like work, but it doesn’t create much new value.

• Deep Work: The cognitively demanding tasks that create real value. Writing a strategic proposal, coding a new feature, developing a marketing campaign, having a deep conversation with a client.

Most of us spend our days trapped in the shallows, wondering why we’re not getting to the deep end. This system is about building a lighthouse to see exactly where the shallow water is.

Part 1: The Raw Material (The 5-Minute Daily Data Dump)

The AI is only as good as the data you give it. But the data collection has to be frictionless, or you won’t do it. Here’s what actually works.

At the end of each day, take five minutes. Open a single, running text file (I use a simple note in Notion). Don’t overthink it. Just brain-dump your day in a few messy bullet points.

What to include:

• Your Calendar: List the meetings you had. (e.g., - 10am: Client Kickoff Call - Project Phoenix (60 mins))

• Your To-Do List: What did you work on? Be honest. (e.g., - Worked on Q4 performance report, - Answered ~20 client emails, - Researched new AI image models)

• Your Distractions: Where did you get sidetracked? (e.g., - Got pulled into a Slack debate about the new UI, - Spent 45 mins trying to fix a bug in my smart sprinkler system)

Here’s what a messy, real-world data dump for a single day might look like:

Wednesday, November 12, 2025:

• 9am: Weekly team sync (45 mins)

• Spent about 2 hours on the Sterling Corp proposal draft

• Answered a flood of emails, probably 90 mins total

• 1pm: Lunch

• 2pm: Client call with “Portland Goods” to discuss their social media campaign (60 mins)

• Wrote a few social media posts for my own channels

• Got stuck debugging a weird API connection for a client project, probably an hour of just staring at code.

• Quick call with my accountant (15 mins)

It’s not perfect. It’s not detailed. But it’s enough. Do this every day for a week. By Friday, you’ll have a messy but valuable log of where your time actually went.

Part 2: The Master Prompt (The “Brutal Honesty” Engine)

This is the heart of the system. At the end of the week, you take your messy log and feed it to an AI with a very specific job description. You’re not asking it to just summarize. You’re asking it to be your high-priced productivity consultant.

Here’s the prompt. Copy it. Save it. This is your engine.