Late 2019. Started logging every single day of building a venture. Publicly. On Medium. Day 1 — "init commit." Goal was 8,760 hours tracking the road to 5M ARR.
Made it 172 days.
What it looked like
Most entries were a few lines. What I shipped that morning. Who I talked to that night. Some days just a sentence. One entry had "Shit" as the subtitle. That was the whole update.
7am on. 2am off. Debugging CloudFront caching. Wiring up MailChimp. Switching from product to biz dev mid-afternoon. Building the website one day, pitching the next, rallying the team on Monday, questioning everything by Friday.
Unpolished. Raw. That was the whole point.
What it taught me
Writing every day forces a clarity that just thinking never does. You have to summarise your day in three lines and suddenly you're confronting how much of it was movement and how much was just motion.
Some days I'd open the draft and have nothing. Not because I'd been slack — I'd been flat out. But busy and productive aren't the same thing. The log made that obvious. Painfully obvious.
Why I stopped
The venture needed me building, not writing about building. There's a line where reflection starts eating into the actual work. Recognising that line was probably the most useful thing I got out of it.
What stuck
Still write notes at the end of every day. Not publicly. But the discipline of three honest lines — what moved, what didn't, what I'm avoiding — that rewired how I work.
Most people have no idea where their time actually goes. I do.