At one of my office jobs, we had a time tracker on our computers that was measuring the time spent at the office, and we needed to spend ~40h/week there. That tracker had a lot of issues, and later the company stopped using it.
At my previous (remote) job, we reported the hours spent on each task, but I was not tracking my time meticulously.

I've recently stumbled upon a Nebulab playbook where they describe pretty strict rules about the time tracking.
E.g. developers need to report separately:

• billable time (spent working on clients' projects)
• time spent on other tasks like 1:1s, studying, etc
• "wasted" time
• report if they worked more or less than 8 hours a day.

It seems like a convenient way to bill clients, but I suppose it can cause stress for the developers.

Personally, I see time tracking more as a personal productivity technique. I often use the Pomodoro and sometimes plan my day hour by hour, but always add some buffering time for context switching and unpredictable stuff.

And what are your thoughts on time tracking?