As someone who helps small businesses leverage their labor efficiency, I can definitively say that nothing gets better without tracking time and working out what's working (and not).
The great thing here is that OP worked something out. My suspicion is that they were simply working on the wrong things (intent vs. actual benefit were incompatible), and therefore felt strange recording time for the sake of it — there was no gratification that the decision they made to spend time on something, the act of laboring over something they felt was meaningful in the moment, and the resulting benefit were never congruous.
Remember: recording time isn't the benefit. It's the tell that gives us a hint as to how we spent time and a smoking gun if we're not doing anything worthwhile. My suggestion for OP: do what works for you, even if it's batshit in the moment. Maybe you're better at jazz than most of us.
In the UK, soccer is a working-class sport, which installs a larger proportional base of enthusiasm among the public (and has done for more than 150 years). In the US soccer is a middle-class distraction from the sports that receive a lot more attention and investment. That compounds.
After 20 years of running small agencies, I've been between things. So I built an actually useful time tracking bot. No logins or interfaces, it just lets you add projects and roles and budgets, and uses Claude to parse plain language into stored records. Then you can calculate your LER (Labor Efficiency Ratio; the big metric agencies should care about) instantly, and see realized cash (accrual basis) instantly. There's a lot more under the hood but the two benefits are:
1. People hate tracking time (slightly less)
2. Operators understand their instruments (much better)
I put all my best ideas and hard-earned lessons into a single product.