How do I remember what I did at work?

Stop relying on remembering. Log the day as it happens — a line when you finish something, a line when you switch tasks — and every 'what did you do?' question becomes reading, not recall.

What is a daily work log?

A dated, running record of what you worked on: tasks finished, decisions made, blockers hit. Not a diary and not a task list — the middle thing, written in the moment, a few lines a day.

How should I prepare for daily standup?

If you keep a work log, preparation is thirty seconds: read yesterday's page top to bottom. Done, doing, blocked are all sitting there in order, in your own words.

Daily Work Log: Never Blank at Standup Again

Work keeps asking you for the same report. Standup wants yesterday. The Friday status update wants the week. Your 1:1 wants the month, the timesheet wants hours, and the annual review wants a year. Different formats, one underlying query: what did you actually do? And most of us answer every single one from memory — which is why standup answers are vague, status updates take an hour, and Decembers feel like an interrogation.

The fix is embarrassingly small: answer the question once, at the moment it's true. A work log is a few dated lines a day, written as the day happens:

09:40 shipped the retry fix — flaky test was the clock, not the code
11:15 reviewed Ali's PR, requested changes on the cache path
14:00 sales call w/ Forma — they need SSO before Q4 #forma
16:30 blocked: staging certs expired, ticket filed

Two minutes a day, total. Each line costs seconds because you write it while the context is still in your head — this is interstitial journaling doing office work.

Every report becomes a read

Standup: read yesterday's page. Done, doing, blocked — in order, in your words, thirty seconds.
Friday status: skim five pages, paste the lines that matter. (Pairs perfectly with a 15-minute weekly review.)
1:1s: tag people — #fatih on any line about that thread — and pull the whole history when the meeting starts.
Review season: the log is the raw material; the brag document compiles itself from the #win lines.

The setup that makes it stick

The log dies if writing a line means switching apps mid-flow. In Hejour, ⇧⌘M pops a small capture field over whatever you're doing — type the line, hit return, back to work. The line lands at the bottom of today.

Since every day is its own page, “yesterday” is a real place you open, not a search you run. Project tags thread across days for per-project status, and if you want the log to half-write itself, the URL scheme lets git hooks and scripts append lines while you work.

Start at the next task switch: one line, timestamped. Hejour is a free download — tomorrow's standup is already easier.

Part of The Daily Notes Guide — methods, app comparisons and workflows for day-based notes.

“What did I do yesterday?” — a daily work log answers before you're asked