(Free) Time tracker - which tags do you use?

I agree it's important to have a specific goal when you sit down to code. What I often do is just let ideas about features bounce around in my head for a few days, sketch down ideas, and make sure I have a coherent picture of what the user side of the feature looks like. Next, I try to make sure I have a game plan for how to design it in the code. If you just push code around, you're going to be wasteful.

That said, I used to be more into keeping track of everything when working on things (not just personal projects, but at my day job), and what I found is that the overhead of keeping track of minute details of what I did generally didn't have a big enough pay off and I dialed it back. Nowadays, I just have high level ideas of what I want to do, but a lot of that comes from experience.

My main point is be careful to not invest too much time in "productivity porn". There are lots of ways of keeping track of what you work on, making notes about ideas you encounter, and so on, and often it feels productive, but it actually isn't. At the end of the day, the most import metric to track is, are you shipping your product quickly and regularly and are users deriving value from it. Everything else is there to grease the wheels of your "machine".