How to work with tasks when plans change.

Intro

A workday that goes strictly according to plan sounds great, but in practice it rarely happens.
In reality, plans tend to change constantly:

• Unexpected calls
• Shifting priorities
• Revisions and new inputs
• External factors

Often, forced deviations from the plan are treated as mistakes.
Because of this, people either start ignoring the plan or stop tracking their work altogether.

However, work chaos shouldn’t be avoided. It should be acknowledged and accounted for.
Overtime Tracker is designed with the assumption that chaos may appear during the workday.
And the workflow won’t break because of it.

Adding an unplanned task (a call)

Any activity that requires your attention,
whether it’s a call, an urgent discussion, or anything else, is essentially a task.

And every such task has urgency, duration, and an impact on the day.
If you don’t track these tasks, it’s easy to miss the moment when your planned work time is gone,
with little actual progress — because such tasks often consume more time than the ones you planned.

In Overtime Tracker, you can always add new tasks to your plan,
(GIF showing how to add a task)

Multiple parallel tasks

There’s a common belief that a person’s focus should always be on a single task at any given moment.
There are many practices built around this idea:

• Pomodoro
• Deep Work
• Time Blocking
• Eat the Frog

All of them are effective, but not always adaptive.

Overtime Tracker isn’t built around a single rigid approach.
You can apply any mono-tasking method when it makes sense.

But you can also work on tasks in parallel.

For example, if your task list includes:

• A work call
• Organizing your workspace

These tasks can (and most likely will) happen at the same time.
That’s why Overtime Tracker doesn’t restrict working on multiple tasks simultaneously.
This doesn’t affect overall time tracking, while still letting you clearly see
how much time was spent on each task.

Pausing a task

During the workday, some tasks often need to be put aside halfway through.
It may feel like no work was done if there’s no visible result.

The more often this happens, the easier it becomes to forget what the day actually consisted of.

That’s why it’s important not to cancel tasks, but to pause them.
When you pause a task, Overtime Tracker records the time already spent and stops the timer
until you’re ready to return to it.
You can also leave notes on the task to avoid losing context.

Returning to the main task

After finishing an unplanned task, you can always return to the task you were working on before.
If you left notes, you can quickly review them and continue without losing focus.

Why the service doesn’t break under chaos

The core idea is that any change is part of the workflow.
If by the end of the day you can see what distracted you and how much time it took,
it gives you major advantages:

• Understanding what distracts you most often
• Deeper analysis and insight into your processes
• Greater psychological calm

Trying to make a workday “perfect” usually leads people away from the desired result.
Perfectionism and rigid schedules that ignore external factors result in exhaustion and apathy.

That’s why this service isn’t about creating an ideal scenario with strict plan adherence.
Instead, it’s about controlling what can be planned and accounting for what can’t.