What your mind predicts, and what your days are actually like.

Why a log

A ship's log records what actually happened, hour by hour, so the navigator can check it against where they thought they were. Your mind keeps a different kind of log. It remembers one bad hour as the whole day, and expects the meeting you dread to be worse than it turns out. Logbook keeps the first kind of log, so you can check the second.

Keeping the log also changes the day. Harvard researchers once pinged thousands of people at random times to ask how they felt and what they were doing. People were less happy when their minds had wandered off what they were doing, and wandering somewhere pleasant made them no happier than staying put. Moments asks that same question a few times a day, and answering it brings you back to what you're doing right now.

Three time scales

Moments · right now

A few times a day it asks: how do you feel about what you're doing right now? You tap once: positive, negative or neutral. Later you can add what you were doing and, for a negative moment, whether it was the thing itself or your mind about it. Over a few weeks it shows what your days are actually made of. And each time it asks, you stop for a second and notice what you're doing.

Days · today

Two small predictions each morning: how good the thing you're looking forward to will be, and how bad the least fun thing will be. That evening you say how they actually went, and how good the day was. About thirty seconds a day.

Goalposts · months to years

“I'll feel good once…” or “I'm worried about…”. For a goal, you say how good life is now and how good you expect it to be once you get there. For a worry, how bad things are now and how bad they'll be if it goes the way you fear. Logbook checks in by email over the months and years after, so you can see whether it changed how you feel.

You can start or stop any of them and run several at once. Stopping never deletes anything.

What it shows you

• The mix of good and bad moments by hour and activity, and how often a bad one was your mind rather than the thing.
• How far each morning's expectations sit from how the day actually went.
• What you expected of each goal and worry, next to every check-in, year after year.
• How good your days were, month by month, next to any number you're tracking.

The charts are plain lines and bars. Until there's enough data, it tells you how much more it needs.

What it doesn't do

No advice unless you ask for it. No streaks, badges or scores. No encouragement messages. One AI feature, only when you ask: after 40 moments it can sort yours into themes. One button exports a readable summary of any date range, so you can review it however you like.

The second instrument

POLAR does this for tournament poker: it separates what you did from what the deck did. Logbook does it for everyday life: it separates what happened from what your mind said would happen.

Read the Becoming essays →