My calendar tracked my meetings. Nothing tracked the other 6 hours. So I built something that does.
I have been a software engineer for 25 years and an engineering manager for 6. I know how to build things. What I could never figure out was how to remember everything I built, reviewed, commented on, or responded to on any given day.
My calendar tracked meetings fine. Everything else just disappeared. PR reviews, Jira comments, ad hoc requests from leadership, performance review prep, one-off conversations that turned into two hours of unplanned architecture discussions. By Friday I could barely reconstruct Tuesday. I eventually started keeping a running Google doc of everything I touched each day, including meetings. It was exactly as tedious as it sounds.
I researched tools that solved this and could not find one I was willing to actually use. Everything was either a time tracker that required me to manually start and stop timers, a task manager that needed manual input, a meeting tool that only cared about my calendar, or some "monitoring" agent I had to install on my PC that tracked everything I did. That last category was not going to happen.
So I spent the last couple months building something myself. Here is what I shipped:
It connects to the tools you already use, GitHub, Jira, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Microsoft Calendar, OneDrive, Azure DevOps, and Bitbucket, and passively observes activity metadata to build a chronological daily work log. No timers. No manual entry. No surveillance. No agents running on your machine. At the end of the day you review what it surfaced, confirm what counts, and move on.
The important part is that it reads metadata only. Never your code, never PR diffs, never document bodies, never calendar event descriptions. Event titles, timestamps, status transitions, file names. That is it.
The technical side, for those curious: it is a .NET 10 clean architecture API with Angular frontend, integrates with eight providers via OAuth, runs a deterministic inference engine to group activity into meaningful work entries, and learns from your accept/reject/edit decisions over time to get better at clustering. No LLMs in the inference pipeline. All explainable, rules-based logic.
I built it entirely for myself. I use it almost every day. But I genuinely do not know if the problem I had is widespread or if I am just uniquely disorganized.
What I am trying to learn from this sub:
Does this resonate with you? Is reconstructing your workday something you actually struggle with? Contractors and freelancers especially, I am curious how you currently handle this for client billing or status updates.
Are there tools out there that actually already solve this that I missed? I looked hard and came up empty, but I am very aware I could have missed something.
What has your experience been sharing something you built for a personal pain point? Did you find the problem was more universal than you expected, or more niche?
I called it Worktrace. worktrace.io if you want to poke around. Happy to answer questions about how it works, how I built it, etc.
Thanks for reading.