All notes

Five things kill multi-year records and all of them are predictable. A system designed against them looks nothing like one designed for a fortnight.

• What a Long-Term System Has to Survive
• Durability Over Accuracy
• Choosing a Format You Can Still Read in Ten Years
• The Smallest System That Works
• What to Decide Before the First Entry

Boredom arrives at month four, which is an accurate assessment of the short-term return and wrong only about the timing.

• The Daily Entry, Sized to Survive a Bad Day
• Missed Days and How to Handle Them
• Backfilling Honestly
• When the Habit Slips
• Boredom, and Why It Arrives at Month Four
• Logging Discipline Without Perfectionism
• The Weekly Ten Minutes

The divisions chosen in year one determine what the record can answer in year five, and changing them later is either impossible or a project.

• Categories That Age Well
• Category Drift and How to Spot It
• Renaming Without Breaking History
• Granularity You Can Sustain
• Tags, Projects and the Difference
• Notes Alongside Numbers

Over ten years, tool death is not a risk but a schedule. The data outlives the tool, which is why the format matters more.

• Every Tool You Use Will Be Discontinued
• Owning Your Data
• Export Formats That Outlive Software
• Tool Migration Without Losing Years
• Syncing Across Devices
• When to Change Tools and When Not To

The return begins at two full years. Before that it is an act of faith, and saying so is more honest than pretending otherwise.

• What Five Years Shows That One Month Cannot
• Seasonality in Your Own Record
• Trends, Noise and the Difference
• Comparing Periods Fairly
• The Annual Read
• Questions Only Long Data Answers

Records degrade before they stop, and the degradation is invisible in the data. Only reading entries catches it.

• System Rot: How It Starts
• The Records You Stop Trusting
• Recovering a Lapsed System
• Starting Over Without Losing the Past
• When the Old Data Stops Being Relevant
• Pruning and Retention

The uses that justify the maintenance, including the one people least anticipate and most value.

• Billing From a Multi-Year Record
• Estimating From Your Own History
• Proving Time Worked
• Health, Energy and Long Patterns
• Study and Skill Acquisition Over Years
• Career Decisions From Your Own Data
• The Record as Memory

A record is good at duration, sequence and change, and poor at value, cause and anything not done.

• What Long Records Cannot Tell You
• Privacy of a Multi-Year Record
• When to Stop Permanently
• Data About Other People, Accumulated

The end state as a checklist, twelve ways records end, and where to start.

• What a Durable Arrangement Looks Like
• Failure Modes, Listed
• Glossary and Where to Start