Seeing Where Your Time Went
You planned the week. Then the week happened.
Most of the time we never close that gap — we set intentions on Monday and, by Friday, have only a feeling about how it went. A good feeling if the days were full, a bad one if they weren’t, and no particular evidence either way.
The Week view is the evidence. It takes the time you actually tracked and lays it over the way you organise your work, so you can see where the week went rather than guess.
Find it under Data → Where the Week Went, or from the line at the foot of your home page.
Start here
Open it on a Friday, before your WRAP. Ten seconds with this view will change what you plan for next week more than ten minutes of trying to remember.
What it shows you
The summary card is the whole week in a few seconds: how much you tracked, how much went to meetings, how many things you touched, and what that works out to per working day. Underneath, one sentence names the thing that took the biggest share — and, if something you’d blocked time for didn’t get it, says so.
The tasks river is the same week as a picture. Your top-level projects and folders run down the left, each widening into its pieces as it flows right. Width is time. The order is your outline’s order, not biggest-first — so the river reads top to bottom the way your task list does, and you can find things where you expect them.
Click any container to drill into it and see its pieces in finer detail. The breadcrumb above shows where you are and takes you back up.
Questions you can answer
Where did my week actually go?
Read the summary sentence first, then the bars. Then look at the river: the widest ribbon leaving the left column is where your week really went, whatever you meant it to be.
If one thing dominates and you’re happy about that, good — that’s focus. If the widest band is something you’d describe as “bits and pieces”, that’s worth knowing on a Friday rather than a month from now.
Did I give the things I said matter the time I planned?
When you drag a project onto your calendar, that block is a plan. The Week view draws it as a dashed outline behind the bar, so you can see the gap between what you set aside and what actually happened.
The summary sentence will call out the biggest shortfall by name — “Investor update got 33% of its planned 2h” — including when the thing is too small to appear in the picture. That’s deliberate: the thing you neglected is exactly the thing that would otherwise be invisible.
How much of my week was meetings?
The In meetings tile counts events you attended, even when you never started a timer on them. A meeting occupies real time whether or not you tracked it, and a week with four hours of meetings is not four free hours.
Events the app closed automatically at the end of the day show separately as unconfirmed — we counted the time, but nobody has confirmed it happened. They’re drawn hatched and kept out of the headline share until you say otherwise.
How much went to keeping the lights on?
Honestly: not yet, not directly. The river shows your week by what you worked on, not by what kind of work it was. If you keep your admin under one folder, that folder is your answer — and that’s a good reason to organise it that way.
A proper answer to this one is coming, together with rating your week.
Did the week move my story?
Also coming. Today you can read your weekly weekly success story and the river side by side and make the comparison yourself; soon the view will draw the connection for you.
Making the picture better
The Week view can only be as clear as the way your work is organised and tracked. Three things sharpen it:
- Track against tasks, not just labels. A timer started from a task lands on that task and rolls up through its parents. An ad-hoc timer with only a name is honest time, but it can’t be placed — it lands in Time on no task and the river has nothing to draw. If that grey bar is large, that’s the single biggest thing you can change.
- Group your work. Projects and folders are what the river flows through. A flat list of forty tasks produces forty slivers; the same tasks under four projects produce a picture you can read.
- Confirm your meetings. Anything left unconfirmed sits outside the headline number, so your week looks smaller than it was.
What it will never do
It won’t rate you. There’s no score, no streak, and no colour that means you did badly.
It won’t invent time you didn’t track. The biggest honest number on the page is the time you actually recorded — nothing is estimated up to make a week look fuller.
And it never changes your tasks. It only reads.
Related
- Estimating Time — how planned blocks get their length
- Colors in Timeblocking — what the calendar’s colours mean
- The Zen Workflow — where reviewing your week fits in the rhythm
- WRAP Plan Guide — the weekly ritual this view was built for