The time tracking thing actually resonated quite well with me. Where I work, we also track time on very specific items (with JIRA/Tempo, which even includes a "stop watch" on each issue).
How I dread logging the hours there! Especially if it's a day or two after the fact. The items will often be specific features to be developed. And so I sit there, with the time sheet (and 20/20 hindsight, of course) asking myself: "How could you possibly have spent that long finishing it? It had a low estimate! Better round down so they don't think I'm an idiot. Who in their right mind would pay someone XYZ to add a lowly checkbox in the corner? I wonder how many hours Bob logged for that radio button he worked on. Those guys outside have emptied half a street's garbage cans in the time it took me to look up this API."
Of course, it's probably mostly in one's head. Like the author I don't really get negative remarks on performance, and consider myself a reasonably decent developer. But even so, the task of painstakingly journaling every half hour worked seems incredibly demotivating sometimes, for presumably no other reason than being a great time to second-guess everything you did.
I've been billing by the minute for about 6 years now. I find it quite liberating. I've got details of what I did for years. Months where I was productive, months where I crashed completely.
I love the details of it, I love how I build up detailed description of what I do as I'm doing it. I think I've had one bill quabbled with about 4 years ago which was me taking too long to write up the change log.
I khow getting time tracking forced on you from above would be frustrating, especially as management would probably abuse it. However I think that it's a shame, I love the transparency of it.
I think it's because you're NOT a bad developer. The problem is, OP sounds like he is definitely a bad developer, and there's really no way around that.
The time-tracking we did was real-time. You sit down, you press "play" and you're tracking. The added bonus (oh jesus, I forgot about this one) was that your status was visible to your manager at all times.
How I dread logging the hours there! Especially if it's a day or two after the fact. The items will often be specific features to be developed. And so I sit there, with the time sheet (and 20/20 hindsight, of course) asking myself: "How could you possibly have spent that long finishing it? It had a low estimate! Better round down so they don't think I'm an idiot. Who in their right mind would pay someone XYZ to add a lowly checkbox in the corner? I wonder how many hours Bob logged for that radio button he worked on. Those guys outside have emptied half a street's garbage cans in the time it took me to look up this API."
Of course, it's probably mostly in one's head. Like the author I don't really get negative remarks on performance, and consider myself a reasonably decent developer. But even so, the task of painstakingly journaling every half hour worked seems incredibly demotivating sometimes, for presumably no other reason than being a great time to second-guess everything you did.