How Much Work Does It Take to Prove You’ve Been Working?

Imagine this: you’ve just finished a project. You’ve sent the final deck to the client, and they’ve stopped emailing. You’re ready to close your laptop and call it a day, but moments before you do it, a reminder arrives: your timesheet is due 5 pm on a Friday, so you need to log “a quick summary” of everything you’ve worked on.

You sigh, knowing just how much time logging work takes you. Having to do work about your work is time-consuming and painfully boring. Nobody wants to do it, especially when you need to reconstruct several days in a row from whatever you can remember.

This article is about that boring chore. We’ll look at why you need to log work, why it can be so time-draining, and where it transforms into a job of its own. At the end of the article, we’ll share how you can stop relying on your memory and an alternative that will speed up the whole process. We have a lot to cover here, so let’s go.

The Work May Be Done, But Paperwork Isn’t

Doing a quick update on the work you’ve done is never quick. Mostly because you need to go through several different apps to find teeny pieces of information:

• You open your calendar to remember which meetings happened.

• You scroll through your inbox to see what emails you actually sent.

• You dig up the doc you edited on a random Tuesday (or was it Wednesday?).

• You skim chat to remember the decision someone made at 4:40 pm, and you never wrote it down.

And after all that digging,you magically squeeze all the info you could find into three little bullets that make your whole week look effortless.

Sounds familiar? We bet it does because this happens to other people, as well.

Microsoft’s 2023 Work Trend Index found that the average employee spends their day 57% communicating (meetings, chat, and email) and 43% creating.

So, it’s not just you. And when you add the time spent documenting all that work, it’s reasonable to ask how much is left for actual work.

So, it’s not just you. When more than half of the day goes to work about work, it’s reasonable to ask how much is left for actual work.

Why an Accurate Update Is Worth Doing

We know you probably won’t like hearing this, but an accurate update of your work (or a report) stops a misunderstanding before it becomes something bigger and/or unmanageable. Like, a decision log can answer “why did we do it this way?” six months later, when you have no idea what was decided or why. Similarly, a timesheet gives you accurate data for invoices and keeps project budgets realistic.

That all said, there’s a simple test for whether a piece of reporting is really worth doing: does someone make a decision, a payment, or a handoff because of it? If yes, that report is absolutely necessary. If not, that report will probably end up in a random folder of Lost & Never Found reports.

If you keep filing reports no one reads, just keep reading this article.

Where Reporting About Work Becomes a Job of Its Own

Work about work easily becomes a job on its own. Here are some early signs you’re way in over your head:

• The same information can be found in three different places. Like, you have information in your project management app, email recap, and some random timesheet. They all say the same thing in slightly different ways.

• The report takes longer than your actual work. Like, it takes you forty minutes to document a thirty-minute task.

• Nobody replies. If your update gets zero questions, reactions, or follow-ups, it’s either perfect or unread. Statistically, it’s probably misplaced and unread.

Who You Should Blame

Why does reporting about work take so long?

Well, writing the update isn’t that time-consuming, but remembering what you did is.

Typing three bullets takes five minutes tops. Figuring out which three bullets to write, and how many hours each deserves, can take an hour. It’s all because our human memory is bad at remembering work days after it happens. The details blur, so we tend to guess, round up, round down, and hope nobody notices.

Now, the frustrating thing is that the evidence of your work already exists. Like, the emails you sent, the docs you edited, the notes from some random call, the calendar invites, the files you opened… you get where we’re going with this. All of it is sitting there, unassembled and scattered across different apps.

Your Friday Afternoon Can Go One of Two Ways

It shouldn’t take much work to prove you’ve been working, and we’re here to prove it.

Meet John, our imaginary freelance product marketer who works with three different clients. It’s 4 pm on Friday, and John owes each client a weekly update and an hours breakdown.

His Friday can go one of two ways.

The First Way

John opens his calendar, then his inbox, then three documents, then a chat thread.

He guesses that the Tuesday strategy call took about two hours (it was 90 minutes plus a long talk about fonts). He pads one client’s hours because he feels guilty about a slow Wednesday.

All in all, John finishes at 5:20 pm, slightly annoyed, and not entirely sure the numbers are right.

The Second Way

The story of John’s week lives in his notes, documents, and meeting write-ups.

This is where a local-first AI assistant like Remio helps him: instead of rereading everything, he asks what he discussed and decided with each client and drafts the update from the material he’s already saved.

Now, the hours are a different question. For that, John opens his Memtime timeline. Memtime has been quietly recording which programs, files, email subjects, and browser tabs he had open throughout the week, so he drags time blocks onto the right client projects.

Ninety minutes of strategy call show up as those ninety minutes. Similarly, slow Wednesday shows up as a slow Wednesday, and he bills accordingly.

Total time spent reporting work: about 25 minutes, give or take, and he trusts the numbers. He used two tools: one helped recall what happened and why, the other helped recall how long it took. Together, they created magic.

Keeping Proof of Work Under Control

You really don’t have to spend hours putting together reports. A few small habits can make the whole thing a lot easier:

• Know why you’re writing the report. Before you start typing, ask yourself this: who’s going to read this, and what will they do with it? If it’s helping someone make a decision, great. If it’s just going to sit in a folder collecting dust, maybe keep it short or skip it altogether.

• Jot things down as you go. You don't need to write a novel after every meeting; a quick note will do just fine. Add a quick note about what was decided, who’s doing what, and when it’s due.

• Write it once and save yourself the trouble. There’s no reason to type out the same update five different times for five different apps. Write it once, tweak it where needed, and move on with your day.

• Let your tools do some of the remembering. Your emails, files, and notes already tell the story of your week. Instead of trying to remember every little thing, use what’s already there. And when it comes to tracking hours, a passive time tracking tool can do wonders for eliminating guesswork.

To Conclude

Proving you’ve been working will always take some work. The keyword here is “some”.

You shouldn’t have to spend your Friday afternoon playing with your own calendar, inbox, and browser history just to figure out what you did the past week.

So, make things easier for yourself. Keep the updates that matter, ditch the ones nobody reads, and let tools like Remio and Memtime help with the remembering. After all, you’ve already done the work, and there’s no need to do it all over again just to prove it.