A week of real hours, as a pie chart
One person tracked every finished task for three weeks. The numbers are not what she expected, and the shape of the week is the useful part.
28 September 2026 · 5 min read
Jeevitha works in data science. She kept a spreadsheet for three weeks: every block of work she finished, which bucket it belonged to, how long it took. No app, just columns and a pie chart at the bottom.
She sent it to us because she wanted the app to do what her spreadsheet did. It is worth looking at before the software, because the spreadsheet already makes the point.
The three weeks
| Week 1 · total | 31.67 h |
|---|---|
| Week 1 · productive | 60.8% |
| Week 2 · total | 37.00 h |
| Week 2 · productive | 74.3% |
| Week 3 · total | 40.00 h |
| Week 3 · productive | 85.0% |
Three weeks, three numbers, one direction. Nothing here is a score the app awarded her. It is her own hours, divided.
You can argue with a feeling about your week. A number is harder.
What the shape shows that the total does not
Forty hours is forty hours. The interesting part is where they went, which is the one thing a weekly total cannot tell you.
Where your hours went
Last week
34.50
hours
- Deep work18.50
- Learning6.00
- Meetings5.25
- Errands3.00
- Other1.75
Five hours of meetings.
You can argue with a feeling. A number is harder.
Five and a quarter hours of meetings in a week reads differently from “a few meetings”. So does two hours of learning when you believed you were spending five.
Three things people find when they first look
- Meetings are bigger than they feel. They arrive in thirty-minute pieces, so they never feel like the biggest thing in the week. Added up, they often are.
- The thing you care about is smaller than you think. Learning, side projects, the work you would call your actual job. It is usually the first hour to get eaten and the last to be missed.
- A lot of the week has no name. Anything you never filed shows up as Other. A big Other is not a failure of the app. It is honest, and it is usually the most interesting slice.
Why it counts finished work, not planned work
A plan is a hope. The report only counts tasks you actually ticked off, because the question is where your hours went, not where you meant to send them.
Hours are counted against the day the work sat in, not the afternoon you happened to check the boxes. Catching up on a Friday should not report as a seventy-hour Friday.
What counts as productive is your call
There is no built-in list of virtuous categories. You mark the ones that are real work for you, and the report tells you what share of your hours they took. For Jeevitha that is Ground Truth and Learning. For you it might be the opposite of that.
It is your week. We are not going to tell you which parts of it counted.