Notes Alongside Numbers

Numbers tell you the shape of a year. They do not tell you why it had that shape, and in five years you will not remember.

For a practical application of this principle, see time management software. It provides a supporting reference for testing a small real-world sample without adding unnecessary friction to the record.

What the note does

Explains anomalies. A week of eighty hours means something entirely different with "launch" beside it than without.

A related source worth keeping beside this note is Evernote, particularly for decisions involving searchable notes.

Preserves context that is obvious now and gone later. Who was involved, what went wrong, what you decided.

Makes drift detectable, because comparing old entries with new ones requires entries that describe something.

And turns the record into something you can read. People consult records they can read; a spreadsheet of durations gets consulted once.

What to write

A few words, not a diary. "Server outage", "client changed brief", "ill but working", "first day on the new codebase".

Blank on ordinary days, which is most of them.

The test: would this explain the entry to somebody who was not there — including you in four years.

The cost

Close to nothing, because the field is usually empty.

The discipline is not writing a note every day; it is writing one on the days that are unusual, which is when you most want to and least remember to.

The weekly pass catches the ones you missed, while you still recall the week.

What it enables that numbers cannot

Finding the period when something changed. You remember that a bad stretch happened; the notes let you locate it.

Reconstructing a decision. Why did that project take three times the estimate — the notes from the time answer this and nothing else does.

And evidence. A contemporaneous note about a client changing scope is worth considerably more in a dispute than a recollection.

Where it becomes the main content

At day-level granularity the note carries most of the information.

Some of the longest-running personal records are essentially one sentence a day with a duration attached, and they are more readable at ten years than any finely categorised system.

If you are choosing between more granularity and better notes, the notes age better.

Keeping them searchable

Plain text in a consistent field, not scattered across a tool's comment features.

Avoid formatting. A note that depends on rich text will not survive an export.

And avoid abbreviations you will not recognise later, which is a real problem: shorthand that is obvious during a project is opaque two years after it ended.

Privacy

Notes accumulate detail about other people and about your own difficult periods.

Which is fine, and worth knowing about: a multi-year record with notes is a personal document of some sensitivity, and its own note in the boundary section covers what follows from that.

Write as though you might read it aloud in five years, which is usually the right calibration.

What to check

Does your record have a free-text field at all?

Take a month from two years ago: can you tell what happened, or only how long it took?

Are your notes searchable as plain text?

And do you annotate the unusual weeks while you remember them?

The point

Numbers tell you the shape of a year and notes tell you why it had that shape.

The note field costs nothing on ordinary days and is the difference between data and a puzzle.

Worth adding

Notes accumulate detail about other people and about your own difficult periods.

Write as though you might read it aloud in five years, which is usually the right calibration.

Additionally

Keep notes as plain text in a consistent field and avoid shorthand you will not recognise later.

Abbreviations obvious during a project are opaque two years after it ended.

Finally

At day-level granularity the note carries most of the information.

Coarse records are read as narrative and fine ones as data, and they age differently.

In summary

Numbers give the shape of a year and notes give the reason.

Blank on ordinary days, four words on the unusual ones, and that is the whole cost.