The Why

We must use time as a tool, not as a couch. We must carve out our own destiny.

— John F. Kennedy, Address to the National Association of Manufacturers (1961)

You are what you do. Not what you say, not what you believe, not how you vote, but what you spend your time on.

— Kevin Kelly, Excellent Advice for Living

I signed up for courses on financial modeling and LBOs in late 2025. To hold myself accountable for completing the exercises in those courses, I started timing myself, initially with a well-regarded timer and its accompanying software. Over time, I got increasingly frustrated with its bugs, particularly having to log in many times a day.

As the buzz around AI coding tools increased in early 2026, out of naiveté, I decided to use them to build a better timer, one that matched what I wanted. Since then, I've made hundreds of decisions to turn GemTimer into what it is today. It's exactly what I want and now I'm sharing it.

The discipline of hitting the Start button, and tracking my progress, has been a great forcing function. Across five months of use, I've found that GemTimer's analytics have been an honest match for my gut feel on whether I had a productive day.

We all say things like "Time is short" and "Make the most of your time". Backing that up with action, by tracking your time, is hard. That's why I've tried to keep GemTimer as simple as possible while still valuable.

Using GemTimer doesn't have to be one of two options: either you account for every second of your day, or you don't use it at all. If you use GemTimer in a disciplined way, you'll see what you directionally spend your time on.

I don't have a good answer for why I didn't track my time in the past. Maybe it's because I was afraid of what the data would show me, or maybe it's because I never found the tool I wanted. Whatever the reason, I use GemTimer every day and my days are the better for it.

Now that you're here, you've already taken the first step. Start using GemTimer to own where your time goes.