Why deep work needs actual time tracking
If you’re like me, you think you’re doing deep work just because you’ve closed Slack and started dark mode in your browser. But unless you’re timing those sessions, you’re just guessing. That was me until I installed Toggl. I didn’t even do it for productivity reasons at first — I was billing freelance work and needed something more accurate than gut feeling and a sticky note.
Here’s what actually happened: I discovered I wasn’t doing deep work as often as I thought. I’d start a session thinking, okay, heads down for two hours. Then I’d check the summary later and see it was maybe 47 minutes. Toggl kept me honest in a way that a Pomodoro app never really could.
The timer feels almost like a contract. You click Start once you’ve chosen the specific task or project. Midway through, there’s a weird guilt if you open YouTube or somehow end up refilling your coffee for the third time. It’s like Toggl is watching, politely. Just… standing there. 👀
How I set up my Toggl workspace for focus
When you first create a Toggl account, it gives you a default workspace and some demo projects. I deleted everything. Clean slate. Then I made three actual projects:
* Client Work
* Deep Work
* Admin Trash
Yes, I literally called it Admin Trash. I was separating anything focused (like building out an Airtable automation) from shallow junk (checking invoices, replying to calendar invites, cleaning up folders I forgot existed).
Keeping Deep Work as its own category let me see which hours actually counted towards the stuff I cared about building — e.g., writing, coding, or planning workflows. I got in the habit of starting the Toggl timer for that category every time I entered mid-level panic mode from the number of open tabs and decided to shut everything down.
Pro tip: there’s an option to force Toggl to ask what you’re working on every time it detects you’re back on the computer. That thing saves lives. You might hate it at first, especially when you’re just passively browsing, but it’s the only reason I stopped five-minute-tab-browsing from turning into full TikTok spirals.
Getting accurate sessions without interruptions
Here’s the part nobody tells you: if Toggl is logging your time correctly but your life isn’t structured right, you’re just generating regret data.
I had a lot of beautiful charts showing inconsistent deep work: a couple of 90-minute blasts followed by full days of zero. The timer doesn’t fix your attention span for you — it just adds a layer of truth you can’t ignore.
What helped the most was putting blocks for deep work directly on my calendar and only allowing Toggl to start when that calendar alert kicked in. Not automated (you *can* do this with an API or Zapier, but mine broke every other Thursday), just manually starting when the real interval hit.
The second thing I did was kill almost every notification on my MacBook. Slack’s still on for emergencies, but otherwise, Focus Mode + Toggl is the combo that finally got me concentrating again. If I look at those time entries later and I see tiny slivers instead of blocks, I know something went sideways — probably me answering Discord in the middle of building my own automations >_<
Using Tags to retroactively explain ruined sessions
You don’t have to use Tags in Toggl, but if you skip them, good luck decoding what happened last Tuesday when you mysteriously logged 13 minutes of productive time between 9AM and 6PM.
I started with super simple tags:
* Interrupted
* Flow
* Context Switching
* Call
* Doubt Spiral 🙂
After each session, especially the short or broken ones, I tagged what happened — no judgment. This is where the data started giving me actual insight. For example, I thought Slack was the killer. Turned out it was random newsletters and the dumb idea to “just check email for a second.”
In the reports, you can filter by tags and see how many hours ended up marked as “Interrupted” versus clean “Flow”. Over a two-week window, this got painfully honest. Stuff I *believed* would take 25 minutes often took more like 90 because I switched tabs, lost a thread of thought, or sat rereading the same paragraph.
Anyway, it’s not about shaming yourself. It’s kinda like looking at your bank account after a spending spree. Knowing beats guessing.
What to do when the timer randomly stops
Oh yeah. This happened to me two full days in a row.
I was deep into writing a proposal when I checked Toggl and saw it had stopped 8 minutes in — like it just gave up. No alert, no crash report. Just gave me a silent, low-key betrayal 😔
After some testing (okay, frantic tab-switching and complaints in three productivity forums), I found it was related to the browser extension. If you give Chrome too many tasks, like 20 active tabs plus three YouTube buffers and Figma prototypes, the Toggl Button sometimes just fails to persist.
The solution that worked for me: I switched to the desktop app. It’s way more stable. Even when my laptop’s fan sounds like a jet engine while exporting a Notion board, the Toggl desktop tracker keeps running quietly.
Make sure you enable “Idle Detection” in the app settings too. It’ll ask if you want to discard time when it thinks you walked away. That’s not just useful for accuracy — it forces you to confirm whether what you just did was part of the task. Bonus self-awareness haha.
Mapping weekly reports to real goals
At first, I just used Toggl to count hours. But after a few weeks, I wanted meaning — not just time blocks.
So I exported my weekly reports (the PDFs are clean enough to read without needing a second coffee for courage) and cross-referenced them with my actual outputs: blog posts published, Zaps fixed, new automations implemented.
I realized weeks with fewer recorded hours often had more impact. Why? Because the time was cleaner. Instead of splitting four hours between eight shallow bursts, I’d have two intense 90-minute sessions. Almost always deeper, more cohesive output.
Eventually I started labeling reports with key results:
* Week of Feb 20 — automation series finished + onboarding email rewritten
* Week of Mar 6 — no notable outputs, majority Admin Trash 😬
You get the pattern. It was less about billing clients at that point and more about making sure I wasn’t drifting through tasks that *felt* important but weren’t adding up.
The ugly side of false busy time
There was a week where I logged over 30 hours of what I thought was deep work. Looked great on paper. But when I did that cross-check thing I mentioned above… only one blog post went out.
That’s when it hit me: some of what I was logging as “Deep Work” was actually reactive work — responding to Slack threads, updating existing workflows, cleaning up old Airtable fields because I got annoyed.
The Toggl timer isn’t magic. If you press Start while vaguely “doing something productive” but don’t actually push anything forward, it’s fake.
So I made a rule: if the task had no defined output (like a doc, a tool, a fix), I had to log it under Admin Trash. Hard to do at first — I felt like I was admitting failure. But once I got strict, not only did my trackers get more accurate, but I had clearer instincts about when something was dragging past its usefulness.
Real talk — nothing’s more sobering than seeing five hours of logs and realizing you can’t remember what you actually made that day. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
When Toggl actually changed how I think
About a month into using it heavily with tags and honest session naming, I started feeling something weird: reluctance to log crappy work.
Not because I didn’t want to track it, but because I didn’t want to *do* it. There were times I’d go to open a poorly-specified ticket and stop myself because I didn’t want my nice “Focused Systems Writing” report to end up tainted with a 43-minute scroll through Coda documentation.
Toggl became a kind of accountability mirror. Not public. Not even shared. Just private proof of where I decided to spend my attention each day.
Anyway, it’s still not perfect. I still have days where I forget to start the timer, or realize I never hit Stop and now I’ve got a 7hr block that started while I was eating lunch. But I can say this: nothing fixed my attention better than seeing the lie in my own time assumptions.