I built a time-tracking app because treating time like money was the only thing that ever worked for my procrastination

I’ve struggled with procrastination for a long time.

At some point, I realised something: I was actually pretty disciplined with money. Not because I never wasted money, or never bought stupid things, but because I always tracked it. Every Franc, every expense, every category. Even when I made bad spending decisions, I knew where the money went.

But with time, I was doing the opposite.

I would lose 30 minutes here, 2 hours there, scroll randomly, switch tasks, drift through the day — and then only have a vague feeling of “today was unproductive.” There was no ledger, no visibility and no accountability.

So I started thinking: what if I treated time like money?

Not in a harsh way. I don’t think the goal is to never waste time. Sometimes you want to scroll, watch YouTube, rest, or do nothing. That’s fine. But I wanted to at least know where my time was going.

That’s why I built Flashback.

The idea is simple:

You define your own activities and categories, like:

Coding → Work

Meetings → Work

Gym → Health

Cooking → Health

Social media → Waste

Netflix → Entertainment

Friends/family → Relationships

For each activity, you can classify whether it’s productive, neutral, waste, etc.

Then instead of manually filling out complicated forms, you just speak or type naturally: and Flashback converts that into structured time entries.

Over time, you build a personal “time ledger” showing where your life is actually going. Then you can look at analytics: how much time went into work, health, family, deep work, distractions, waste, etc.

The thing that helped me most was not trying to become perfectly disciplined overnight. It was simply making time visible. Once I could see the patterns, it became much harder to lie to myself.

The app is still early, but the core idea is working. I’d especially love feedback from people who struggle with procrastination, ADHD-like time blindness, context switching, doom scrolling, or just generally feeling like the day disappears.

Link: http://flashback.digital

Flashback.digital

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