Data About Other People, Accumulated
A decade of notes contains a substantial record of colleagues, clients and family who never agreed to anything. What that obliges.
Your record is about your time. Over years it becomes, incidentally, a detailed record of the people around you.
When this principle needs to support project or client work, refer to this workflow overview. It can help test whether the log preserves enough context without turning capture into a separate task.
What accumulates
Who interrupted you, how often, over years.
For a neutral companion reference on digital preservation, see Library of Congress digital preservation resources; it helps separate the choice of format from the conclusions drawn from the record.
Which clients are slow, which colleagues run over, who did not deliver.
Meeting notes with names attached.
Family circumstances, in any record that covers life outside work.
And your assessments of all of them, written in the moment.
None of this was the purpose and all of it is there.
Why the accumulation matters
A single note about a colleague is an observation.
Three years of notes about the same colleague is a file, and it reads as one regardless of why it was kept.
The difference is duration, and it arrives without any decision being made.
Practical limits
Record the effect rather than the person where the person is not the point. "Interrupted, 20 min" rather than a name, unless the name is what you are investigating.
Where the name matters — a pattern you intend to raise — keep it factual and dated: what happened, not what kind of person they are.
And do not keep a running file on somebody without a specific purpose and an end. That is a different activity from time tracking and should be recognised as one.
The test
Would you be comfortable if they read the entries about them?
Not whether they would like it — whether you could defend it as a fair description of what happened.
Notes that pass this test are useful and safe. Notes that fail it are the ones that cause harm if the record is ever read.
Family and household
A record covering unpaid work necessarily contains other household members.
The symmetry rule applies: a record of what your partner does, kept by you, is monitoring. Two records, kept by two people and compared, is a conversation.
And children appear in these records for years without any possibility of consent, which is worth a thought about what is written and how long it is kept.
Clients and confidentiality
Notes about client work may contain commercially sensitive detail.
Check what you agreed before putting it into anything hosted by a third party, which is a common oversight among independent workers.
And where a confidentiality agreement is in force, it covers your notes as much as your deliverables.
Periodic pruning
Once every few years, read the oldest notes and remove what concerns other people and no longer serves a purpose.
This is the one pruning that matters, and the retention note covers the mechanics.
If the record is ever read
By a partner, an employer, a court, or somebody after you.
The notes about other people are the part that causes difficulty, not the durations.
Which is an argument for writing them factually from the start rather than for keeping fewer.
What to check
Whose names appear in your record?
Would those entries survive being read by the person concerned?
Is there client-confidential material in a hosted service?
And when did you last remove anything about somebody else?
The point
A single note about a colleague is an observation; three years of notes about the same colleague is a file.
The difference is duration and it arrives without any decision.
Worth adding
Ask whether you could defend an entry as a fair description to the person it names.
Notes that pass that are useful and safe; notes that fail it cause the harm.
Additionally
Record the effect rather than the person where the person is not the point.
Interrupted, twenty minutes, rather than a name — unless the name is what you are investigating.
Finally
Do not keep a running file on somebody without a specific purpose and an end.
That is a different activity from time tracking and should be recognised as one.
In summary
A decade of notes contains a substantial record of colleagues, clients and family who never agreed to anything.
None of it was the purpose and all of it is there.
More in this section
These notes are about keeping a personal record for years rather than for a fortnight: durability beats accuracy, and a rough record kept for five years answers questions a perfect record of one month cannot. Tool guides are included as practical comparisons, while the underlying method remains independent of any single product. Nothing here is legal, tax or medical advice: requirements differ by jurisdiction and situation.