The daily log

If workspace/BRAIN.md is the heart of the harness, the daily log is its mouth. Everything flows through it.

Every working day gets one file at 12-daily-log/[year]/[month-Mon]/[YYYY-MM-DD].md. Example: 12-daily-log/2026/05-May/2026-05-20.md.

What the daily log is

An operational record. Not a journal, not a calendar, not a to-do list. A structured capture of what happened during the working day.

The seven sections

The template in 12-daily-log/Templates/daily-log-template.md has these sections in order:

1. Session Focus — 1-2 sentences. What was this session about?
2. Work Completed — bullets per area. Concrete, with file paths or commit hashes.
3. Decisions Made — table with two columns: decision + rationale.
4. Key Learnings — bullets. What surfaced that will change a future decision?
5. Open Loops — OPEN: prefix per line. Loose ends without a home.
6. Carry Forward — concrete next actions. The morning brief reads this.
7. Email Triage (optional) — when you did a 24-hour inbox scan.

That's it. Five required, two optional. Most days don't need all seven.

Why the structure matters

Without structure, daily logs become free-form journals. They feel productive to write but produce little re-readable signal.

The structured format makes each section answerable in 30-60 seconds:

• Session Focus: one sentence. Done.
• Work Completed: bullet list of files touched or things shipped. Done.
• Decisions Made: only entries when you actually decided something. Often empty.
• Key Learnings: only entries when something durable surfaced. Often 0-2 items.
• Open Loops: OPEN: prefixed lines, dropped throughout the day, not written at the end.
• Carry Forward: concrete next-actions before you close the laptop.

A typical daily log entry is 200-400 words. Five minutes to write at session end. Three minutes to read at session start.

When to write

Three moments matter:

Throughout the day

When something doesn't have a home yet — a vendor to call, a decision pending, a thread to revisit — drop an OPEN: line into today's daily log file. No formatting, no preamble:

This is capture, not planning. The discipline: anything that takes more than 2 seconds to remember gets dropped here.

End of each work session

The first work session of the day, you may be creating today's daily log file from scratch. Subsequent sessions, you append.

Required at session end:

• Session Focus (replace if a new session theme)
• Work Completed (append bullets)
• Decisions Made (append rows if you decided)
• Key Learnings (append bullets if surfaced)

Before you close the day

Required at end of day:

• Carry Forward — what does tomorrow need to know?

If you skip Carry Forward, tomorrow's morning brief has nothing to read, and your fresh-context starting point is degraded.

The "multi-session day" pattern

You may have 2-3 working sessions per day, especially if you context-switch between businesses or operate across time zones.

The harness handles this with a ## Session 1: / ## Session 2: heading structure within a single daily log file. Each session appends, never overwrites.

The template for multi-session days:

Reasoning: you want one file per calendar day for chronological clarity, but multiple sessions get visually separated.

The /logs slash command (chapter 08) handles this automatically — it reads existing content and appends rather than overwriting.

What goes in Work Completed

Be specific. "Refactored customer flow" is useless. "Removed step 3 (manual approval) from 07-revenue/onboarding-flow.md. Tested with 3 sample customers." is useful.

Include:

• File paths when applicable
• Git commit hashes for code changes
• Specific quantities (3 customers, $1,247, 4 invoices)
• Names of people involved

Exclude:

• Vague characterizations ("worked on marketing")
• Process narration ("first I tried X, then I tried Y")
• Emotions or vibes

What goes in Decisions Made

Only decisions you would not want to re-litigate. Format:

Decision	Rationale
Renew the Hartford insurance policy at current premium	Quoted alternative is 12% higher; no coverage gap
Drop the Tuesday lunch happy hour	6 weeks of data shows it cannibalizes dinner

Each decision: one sentence + one sentence of reasoning. If you need a paragraph, the decision isn't actually made.

The decisions table feeds upward into MEMORY.md when patterns emerge ("we keep choosing X over Y"). It feeds upward into CHANGELOG.md when the decision triggers file changes.

What goes in Key Learnings

The 1-3 things this session surfaced that will change future sessions.

Examples:

• "Local Ollama qwen3:4b restates inputs when given a few-shot example. Removing the example produces grounded output."
• "Vendor invoice email format changed on 4/15. Old parser misses the new format. Updated regex."
• "Tip rate dropped 0.4pp this month. First time in 6 quarters. Watch."

If a learning isn't going to change a future decision, leave it out.

The Open Loops section

OPEN: lines that accumulated during the day, gathered into one section at session end.

The discipline: every OPEN: line is either:

• Resolved by end of day (delete it)
• Carried forward to tomorrow (keep it in this section)
• Promoted to a real task somewhere (move it; mark resolved here)

The morning brief (next chapter on the OPEN convention) reads these as one of its inputs.

The Carry Forward section

Three to five concrete actions. Not aspirations. Actions:

• Email Acme Vendor about the December invoice discrepancy (waiting since 5/15)
• Decide between Quote A and Quote B on the new dishwasher
• Review the Hartford policy renewal terms before signing

A fresh session tomorrow should be able to start working from this list alone, with no chat history.

This is the most important section in the daily log. If you skip everything else, write Carry Forward.

How long should a daily log be?

5 lines minimum. 400 words maximum.

If you regularly hit 800+ words, you're treating the log as a journal. Cut.
If you regularly stop at 5 lines, you're not capturing enough. Add.

Aim for 200-400 words on most days. Heavy days run longer; admin days run shorter.

The continuation test

After writing a daily log, ask:

"If tomorrow's session started with only this file and BRAIN.md (no chat history, no memory of what happened), could it continue the work?"

If not, what's missing? Add it.

This question is the entire point of the daily log. The harness assumes you may not remember today's context tomorrow. The log compensates.

When you skip a day

It happens. Don't write yesterday's log today and pretend it was real.

Instead: tomorrow's log opens with a one-liner:

Then proceed normally. The gap is itself useful information — sustained gaps are a signal worth noticing.

What the daily log is not

Not therapy. Not a creative writing exercise. Not a comprehensive record of every email and message.

The discipline is compression. The day produces 1000 micro-events. The log captures the 5-10 that change future work.

Next chapter: the OPEN: convention, in more depth.