The person monitoring small changes carries work that is difficult to show at the end of a day.

Watching is work, though it produces nothing you can point at. Someone tracking appetite, breathing, mood, or the colour of a wound spends a whole day holding a baseline in their head and comparing against it. When nothing changes, the day looks empty from outside, and the person doing it often applies that judgment to themselves. The attention was the labour, and it was expensive.

If you know someone in that position, ask what they noticed rather than what they got done. And if the watcher is you, it is fair to count those hours as work when you describe how your day went.