Why do time trackers feel like lying to yourself?
Manual time trackers feel like lying because, quietly, they are. You open the app at the end of the day, or worse the end of the week, stare at a blank grid, and try to remember what you did on Tuesday afternoon. You round up so you do not look idle, or down so you do not look bad at estimating. You attach a project code that feels close enough. What you submit is not a record. It is memory, run through the filter of how you want to be seen, rendered as decimals.
That is not a character flaw. It is what the format asks of you.
Honest data has to be collected, not remembered.
The fix is not more discipline about the grid. It is to stop asking you to remember at all. I watch the day as it happens, on your own machine, so the record is real and you never have to reconstruct it. And because you told me in the morning what mattered, that real record means something, instead of being a defensible set of numbers.
You cannot lie to a tracker that was already watching, and you have no reason to want to. That is the point.