Why I stopped using a spreadsheet to journal my workday

I used to write here a lot. Essays, thoughts, half-finished ideas that needed somewhere to land. Somewhere in the last couple of years, client work expanded to fill every available hour and the writing stopped. Not dramatically. Just quietly, the way habits die when you're busy enough to not notice them going.

This post is me coming back. And it happens to be about the thing that made coming back feel possible again.

The spreadsheet phase

For a while, I tried to track my workdays in spreadsheets. One tab per client, columns for tasks and blockers and notes I kept meaning to fill in. It looked like something a productive person would use.

The problem was I already knew where my time was going. I lived it. What I couldn't answer was whether any of it mattered. The spreadsheet tracked tasks. It had no opinion on whether I was spending time on the right things. Every time I closed it, I forgot it existed.

Multiple tabs became their own problem. Which client was that? Which week? After a while, opening it felt like filing paperwork rather than thinking.

Then Notion. Then a notebook.

Notion was a prettier version of the same filing cabinet. Task lists spread across multiple pages, none of it helping me understand my own work.

The notebook was closer to what I wanted but had its own failure mode. After a chaotic day, staring at a blank page and deciding what mattered was one decision too many. I kept postponing. One day became three. The blank page that expects nothing of you gives nothing back.

None of these tools were wrong. They were just solving a different problem than the one I had.

The problem I couldn't name for a long time

I work alone. Client projects that pay the bills, plus building my own product on the side. My days don't have a clean shape. A morning on one client's architecture, an afternoon on a proposal, an evening pushing a feature. By the time I close my laptop the day feels full and impossible to account for at the same time.

What I needed wasn't a record of what I did. I needed a way to understand what my days were adding up to. Whether I was actually moving or just staying in motion. That distinction took me embarrassingly long to name.

The capstone project that became a product

In 2023, I was doing PDM program with PyBites. For my capstone I started building a work journaling tool and did a round of user interviews to validate it.

The thing that came up most consistently: people didn't journal because the blank page stopped them. Not laziness. Just paralysis after a chaotic day. They needed somewhere to start.

That's where the five prompts came from. How did your day go. What moved forward. What was hard. What you'd do differently. And a catch-all for everything else. Not a form, just enough structure to get out of your own head.

I stopped building it when client work took over. I restarted earlier this year, building in the hours around paid work, and started using it myself from day one. That product is WorkBuddy.

What surprised me about using it

Ten minutes at the end of the day. Sometimes less. The prompts meant I wasn't deciding what to write, just answering questions.

The honesty surprised me more. Something about a direct question produces a direct answer. I started writing things I'd never put in a spreadsheet row. That I'd been distracted. That a client conversation had left me unsettled. That I'd done the easy work all day and avoided the hard thing.

Those things don't live in spreadsheets. But they shape your week more than the tasks do.

The weekly summary

Every Sunday night, WorkBuddy generates a summary of the week from everything I've written. I designed this feature. What I didn't anticipate was what it would feel like to receive it.

Here's a section from a real one, with identifying details removed:

The April revenue goal is gone. $2000 minimum and no invoice raised all month. That's not a bad week wiping out a good month. That's a pattern across April that this week is just the end of. May needs a different shape from the start, not just a different intention.

No spreadsheet ever said that to me. No Notion page ever connected those dots. Those tools stored information. They didn't synthesise it.

Another one from the same week:

The phone. Every single day. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. You know it because you keep writing it down. The cost isn't just 20 minutes here and there. It's the task that should take 30 minutes taking an hour. The phone isn't a distraction, it's a drag on everything downstream.

I had written about my phone in three separate entries that week. I hadn't noticed it was three times. The summary noticed.

Where things are now

55 journal entries. 10 weekly summaries. 2 monthly summaries. Roughly four months of consistent use.

My days are still chaotic. But I have a clearer sense now of which chaos is productive and which is just noise. I catch patterns in a week instead of discovering them three months later.

WorkBuddy launches mid August. If any of this resonated, you can get early access at useworkbuddy.com.

And I'm going to try to write here more often again. No promises on frequency. But the habit of reflection, turns out, is worth protecting.