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I tracked every single hour I worked for 90 days. Here's what I found. (It's not what I expected.)

Christian West · 2026-09-23T00:42:06.429-07:00

I decided to do an experiment. For 90 days, I logged every hour of work in a spreadsheet. Not just "worked on product" but exactly what I did. Every task, every meeting, every rabbit hole.Here's the breakdown:Product development: 31% (I thought it was way more)Admin/email/ops: 24% (this one hurt to see)"Research" (reading Twitter, watching YouTube, "staying informed"): 18%Actual customer conversations: 9%Marketing/distribution: 7%Fixing things I broke: 6%Staring at the screen feeling overwhelmed: 5%The number that gutted me was the 18% I spent on "research." I was consuming content about building instead of actually building. I was reading threads like this one instead of talking to users.The other number that surprised me was customer conversations at 9%. I genuinely thought I was "talking to users all the time." I wasn't. I was thinking about talking to users. I was planning to talk to users. I was reading about how to talk to users. But I wasn't actually doing it.The 5% staring at the screen? That was usually right after I saw a competitor launch something or someone on Twitter announced funding. Pure paralysis.Has anyone else actually tracked their time like this? What did you find that surprised you? And more importantly—did seeing the numbers actually change your behavior, or did you just feel bad about it for a week and go back to the same patterns?

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