Speak for yourself. I didn't find it useless at all.

Knowing is half the battle.

My solution to this problem is to track everything I do. I use RescueTime and Toggl. Rescue time for automatic background tracking, and Toggl for tracking projects and tasks. I review my time sheet weekly and if I see a project or minor things take up a large portion of my time, I'll actively reduce that the next week and focus more on things that got neglected this week.

Before I started doing this, I often got distracted by doing productive stuff, i.e watching video tutorials, listening to podcasts or reading blogs, instead of getting down to coding the project. You gotta find a balance, monitor it and stick to it.