You did the work. Log it afterwards.
Most planners only write forwards, which is why their records have holes. Say what you did yesterday and it still counts.
28 September 2026 · 3 min read
You read for half an hour last night. You did not add it to anything, because you were reading, not planning.
This morning the app knows nothing about it. And most apps give you no way to say so: you can add a task for tomorrow, you can add one for today, and yesterday is simply gone.
A tracker you can only write forwards into is a tracker with holes.
Say when it happened
“yesterday I read ‘Eat That Frog’ for 30 mins”
That lands on yesterday with thirty minutes against it, already ticked off, and counts towards yesterday’s hours on your report.
These all work the same way:
- “yesterday” and “last night”
- “day before yesterday”
Why it arrives already done
Because it is. A day that has already happened is a record, not a plan. Left open it would sit there in red as overdue and count for nothing, which is the opposite of why you typed it.
The reason to write down yesterday at all is so the hours show up.
Never quietly
Marking something complete on your behalf is the kind of thing an app should be nervous about. So it says so first: a logged as done chip appears beside the date and the length, before you press the button.
The same chip shows on every line when you paste a list, so twenty rows cannot slip past you.
Where the hours land
On the day the work sat in, not the morning you got round to typing it. Catching up on a week of entries on a Friday should not report as a seventy-hour Friday.
Which means a week you forgot to record can be recovered on Monday in about a minute, and the shape of it will still be true.