Sunday Night Time Archaeology: The Hidden Tax of Reconstructing Your Freelance Hours

Introduction Every Sunday night at 9pm, I used to do something I called "time archaeology." I'd open my laptop, stare at a blank spreadsheet, and try to reconstruct what I had done across four clients over the previous five days. Calendar. Slack history. Git commits. Browser history. Sometimes a sketchbook on my desk if I'd been wireframing. It took 60-90 minutes. Every week. And the time I logged at the end of it was — at best — a guess. This post is about what that guessing actually costs, and