Why track hours nobody pays you for?
Three reasons, in increasing order of importance:
- Awareness. Salaried workers consistently underestimate their hours. What feels like "a bit late sometimes" is often an hour a day — thousands of dollars a year in free work.
- Leverage. A documented pattern turns "I feel overloaded" into "my average workday has been 9h 9m for the last quarter." Managers can dismiss feelings; they have to engage with data.
- Protection. If you're ever misclassified as exempt (see do salaried employees get overtime?), a contemporaneous record of your hours is exactly what a back-pay claim needs. The U.S. Department of Labor itself advises workers to keep their own time records.
What to record
You need four data points per day — nothing more:
| Field | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Start time | When you actually began — first email counts, not badge-in time |
| End time | When you truly stopped, including the evening "one last thing" |
| Lunch / breaks | Keeps your total honest; skipped lunches are unpaid work too |
| Date | Weekend entries are the most telling data you'll collect |
Consistency beats precision. A slightly-rounded log kept every day is worth far more than a perfect log kept for two weeks and abandoned.
How to track it with WorkWize
Spreadsheets die because they demand effort at the worst moments — end of a long day. WorkWize (free on iPhone) reduces the habit to seconds:
- Tap Start Workday when you begin. One tap from the home screen.
- End your workday when you actually log off. Working late? The extra time is captured automatically as unpaid hours beyond your standard day.
- Toggle the lunch break. Or log a day manually with the date, start, and end pickers — perfect for backfilling yesterday.
- Let the app do the analysis. Your Weekly Summary shows total hours, average start and end times, and average lunch duration. The Workday Details chart highlights months where your average crept up — overwork patterns in orange, at a glance.
Privacy note: WorkWize is a personal tracker. There's no employer account, no manager dashboard, no timesheet approval. Your log is yours alone, stored on your device.
Turn the log into action
After 4–6 weeks you'll have what most employees never do: an evidence-grade picture of your real workload. Use the weekly cost-of-unpaid-hours figure to decide if it's worth raising with your manager, and the monthly trend to catch the moment "busy season" quietly becomes "the job."
Track it automatically with WorkWize
The free unpaid overtime tracker for salaried professionals. Log your day in 10 seconds — see your true hourly pay and the cost of every unpaid hour.
