DoneThat vs No time tracking

The short answer

Not tracking is a legitimate choice, and for a lot of people it is the right one. It costs nothing, takes no setup, and cannot be abandoned — which is more than most tracking habits manage.

It stops being the right choice at a specific point: when you can no longer answer where your week went, and that starts to matter. Until then, tracking is overhead with no return, and we would rather say that than pretend everyone needs this.

When not tracking is correct

Three conditions. If all three hold, close this page.

Nobody is buying your hours. No client billing, no timesheet, no capacity planning that depends on the number.

Your output is objectively visible. If what you shipped is obvious to you and everyone else, the hours behind it are decoration.

You are content with how your weeks go. Not "resigned to" — content. If nothing about your working pattern bothers you, measuring it will not improve it.

That is a real population, and for them every tool in this comparison is a solution looking for a problem.

What not tracking actually costs

The cost is not that you lack a number. It is that drift is invisible.

Nothing announces that a recurring meeting stopped being useful eight months ago. Nothing flags that admin has grown from two hours a week to six. Nothing points out that the work you consider your main contribution now gets about a fifth of your attention. Each of these changes is small enough to pass unnoticed, and they only become visible once they are large — at which point they feel like normal.

Two smaller costs follow:

Your estimates stay bad. Estimation improves by comparing your guess against what actually happened. With no record, there is no feedback loop, so the same optimism repeats indefinitely.

You have nothing to point at. When you need to make the case that your workload is unreasonable, or that a project cost far more than anyone assumed, "it felt like a lot" is a weak argument and everyone knows it.

The objection worth taking seriously

A lot of people who avoid tracking are not avoiding measurement. They are avoiding being measured — the sense of a system scoring the day and finding it wanting, or of an employer with a dashboard.

That objection is well earned by this category, and it should shape what you pick rather than whether you pick anything.

For what it is worth, DoneThat's answers: screenshots are never stored — processed in real time, deleted immediately, only the derived structured activity persists. Apps you exclude are redacted on your machine before anything is sent. You can bring your own Gemini or OpenAI-compatible model so raw activity never reaches our servers. Visibility is set per summary by the person it belongs to, and private is a fully supported way to use the product. Team dashboards run on high-level summaries with relative trends rather than per-person hours. The desktop app is open source.

If the concern is being watched, the thing to check in any tool is who can see what and who decides. Not whether it captures.

Why automatic capture, if you try anything

If you have avoided tracking because previous attempts collapsed, that is not a discipline failure — it is the predictable outcome of a system that requires you to remember it.

Automatic capture has no habit to maintain. There is nothing to start, nothing to fill in, and nothing to catch up on Friday afternoon. The lowest-cost experiment available is to run it for two weeks, look at the reconstruction once, and decide whether the answer was worth knowing. If it was not, you have lost two weeks of a subscription and learned something.

Where not tracking is the better choice

• All three conditions above hold. Genuinely: no billing, visible output, contentment.
• Your work is deep and singular. If you do one thing all day, you already know where the time went.
• You are in a period where measurement would make things worse. Sometimes the honest answer is that you need rest, not data.
• You cannot allow any capture, by policy or preference.
• Every tool you have tried has become another thing to manage. Worth trying an automatic one before concluding, but a fair reason to stop.

Where DoneThat is the better choice

• You cannot answer where last week went, and it bothers you.
• Your estimates are consistently wrong and never improve.
• You suspect drift — that meetings or admin have quietly grown — but have no way to check.
• You need evidence for a workload conversation.
• You want coaching. Don nudges you onto goals, blocks calendar time, flags low-value work while you can still fix it, checks your mood, reminds you of meetings, suggests breaks.
• You want AI tools to have your work history as long-term memory through MCP and an API.

How we compared these

There is nothing to cite: not tracking is the absence of a tool. Claims about DoneThat are first-hand — we build it, and it is worth reading this knowing we sell one of the two options.

The case for doing nothing is stated as fairly as we can make it because it is genuinely correct for some readers. The narrower claim we would defend is that most people who have given up on tracking gave up on manual tracking, and concluded something about themselves that was actually a fact about the tool.

Questions people ask about No time tracking

Do I actually need to track my time?

Not if nobody buys your hours, your output is objectively visible, and you are content with how your weeks go. Those three conditions cover a lot of people, and for them tracking is overhead with no return. It becomes worth it when you cannot explain where the time went, when your estimates are consistently wrong, or when you need evidence for a conversation about workload.

What is the cost of not tracking?

Invisible drift. Nothing announces that a recurring meeting has stopped being useful or that admin has grown from two hours a week to six. Without a record, those changes are only noticeable once they are large, and by then they feel normal.

Isn't tracking just self-surveillance?

It can be, and that is a fair objection to a lot of this category. It depends on who the data is for. DoneThat never stores screenshots, applies your app exclusions on your machine before anything is sent, and lets you set visibility per summary — private is the default and a supported way to use it.

What is the lowest-effort way to start?

Automatic capture, precisely because there is no habit to maintain. The failure mode of manual tracking is that you stop; there is nothing to stop with capture. Run it for two weeks, look at the reconstruction, and decide then whether the answer was worth knowing.