How do you track time that you spend on the project that is not done inside the editor; for example research?

Exactly my thoughts. Many projects are more about the research, and less about the time purely spent coding. Many times, my research time > coding time, so it would be cool if WakaTime made a Chrome plugin that could track that time.

I use rescuetime to track browser page titles. I use wakatime for tracking too.

I use emacs and one org mode file per project so it tracks kind of well as long as my research produces notes.

As a proper Emacs user I also do my e-mailing there and my e-mail is in a git repository. Whenever I feel like I haven't got much done in a day I can usually verify that I it was because I spend like half a day writing e-mails instead of coding.

One of the more surprising stats I have found out about myself is that I regulary spend about 5% project time writing git commit messages.

I actually find the most value of wakatime that I can keep track of that I don't work too much on the "wrong" projects. Wakatime has helped me hold off things I should not focus on that much.

Wakatime has at least somewhat reduced my imposter syndrome tendencies because I can use it to disprove the feeling that I'm not getting things done because it tells me that I got things done even if it was not the things I originally had plan to get done.