Time tracking for designers: measuring Figma days

23 August 2026 · 6 min read

A designer’s day is supposed to be spent in the design tool, and it rarely is. The honest way to find out how much of it is Figma (or whichever tool you live in) is to let the Mac record which app is in front and read the totals at the end of the day, rather than guessing. Two weeks of that gives you the real Figma fraction, the real review fraction, and usually a surprise about messages. This post is how to do it without a timer and without letting anything read your canvas.

The question is the ratio, not the total

Designers do not usually need to know they worked eight hours. They need to know how much of the eight was making and how much was everything around making: feedback threads, mail, meetings, exporting for handoff, chasing a font license. The useful number is the ratio, and it moves from week to week depending on where the project is.

Early in a project the ratio should lean towards the design tool. Near a handoff it tips towards messages and the browser. Neither is wrong, but if you do not measure it you cannot tell whether a heavy-message week is the project’s phase or a creeping pattern. Meetings versus making is the general version of this measurement.

Why window titles are a bad idea for a designer

Most automatic trackers improve on “Figma, five hours” by reading window titles, which means they need Accessibility permission. For a designer that is a particularly poor trade. Window titles in a design tool are file names and page names: the client’s name, the unreleased product, the codename. A tracker that stores those is storing your client list.

An app-level tracker never sees any of it. It knows Figma was in front for five hours and nothing about what was on the canvas. Punchcard works this way, records app names only, and asks for zero macOS permissions: no Accessibility, no Screen Recording, no Full Disk Access. For a designer under NDA, that is not a nicety; it is the difference between a tool you can run on client work and one you cannot.

Setting up a two-week measurement

Write down your guess. “I spend about 70 percent of the day in Figma.” Seal it; you will want it later.
Open Punchcard. It appears in the menu bar with no setup wizard. Set a closing time, which is the only decision.
Work for two weeks as you normally would. Do not change anything deliberately.
Each day at closing time, a receipt prints: apps itemized with time per line, a day total, a stamp. Tear it off (drag down). Keep them, either on screen or exported as PNG.
On each Sunday a week roll prints with the week’s totals.
After two weeks, lay the receipts out and calculate: design-tool minutes divided by total minutes, per day and per week.

Compare with the sealed guess. Why your estimate of your own workday is wrong by hours explains why the gap is almost always in the same direction.

Reading a designer’s receipt

A few patterns show up reliably once you have a stack of them.

The browser line is bigger than expected. Reference gathering, prototype testing, design system documentation, stock sites. Some of that is making. It is still worth knowing that a third of “Figma time” happened in a browser.
Messages are spread thin across the day. Forty minutes total in a chat app sounds fine until you realize it was twenty separate interruptions. The receipt shows the total; the cost of switching apps is what the total does not show and is worth reading alongside.
Handoff days are different animals. A day near delivery may show the design tool at two hours and mail, chat and a file transfer app filling the rest. That is the project working correctly. The receipt lets you see the phase rather than feel guilty about it.
Prototyping tools and image editors add up. Designers often run three or four creative apps. The receipt lists each, so “making” may be the sum of several lines, not just the main one.

What the receipt cannot tell a designer

Which file or which client. App names only. You split that from memory, which for a designer with two or three active projects is usually easy.
Whether the five Figma hours were good. Staring at a component for an hour is an hour in Figma.
Time on the iPad or iPhone. There is no iPhone app and no sync; this measures the Mac.
Per-project totals for billing. Punchcard has no projects, no rates and no invoicing. If you bill by project, the receipt is your check on the timesheet, not a replacement for it.
Idle time. There are no idle detection settings. If you leave the design tool open and go to lunch, lunch is in Figma. Lock the screen when you leave.

What to do with the ratio

Once you have two weeks, pick one thing. If the design-tool fraction is lower than you want, the receipts will show where the rest went, and that is the thing to move, not your willpower. Turn off notifications for one app, batch mail into two slots, or move reviews to a single afternoon. Then measure for two more weeks. How to tell if a productivity change actually worked is the method for that comparison, and a stack of receipts is what makes it possible.

Tracking in Punchcard never expires and the first seven receipts are free, which covers the first week of the measurement outright. After that it is nine dollars once for two Macs.

Questions

I use several design apps. Do they get lumped together? No. Each app is its own line on the receipt. Add the lines that count as making for you; the receipt does not decide that for you.

Does it see what is on my canvas? No. It records app names only, and has no permission that would let it see anything else: no Accessibility, no Screen Recording. It has no networking code either, so nothing could leave the Mac even if it did.

Can I share the receipt with my team? Export it as a 1080 by 1350 PNG or copy the plain text and post it wherever you like. It shows apps and hours, not files or clients, which is exactly what makes it safe to share.

What if most of my design work is in a browser-based tool? Then the browser line is your making line, and the ratio is harder to read. Using the tool’s desktop app, where one exists, separates it from the rest of the browser on the receipt.