Should you log how you felt, or just what you did?

You sit down to write one line about the afternoon and hesitate over what the line is actually for. Do you write what happened — "meeting ran long, missed lunch" — or do you write what it was like — "frustrated, drained, snapped at someone I shouldn't have"? They feel like they should be the same entry. They are not, and picking wrong is a quiet reason a lot of logs stop getting used.

What a bare fact survives

A line that names what happened keeps meaning no matter how much time passes between writing it and reading it back. "Meeting ran long, missed lunch" tells you something concrete a year later even if you remember nothing else about that Tuesday. It does not need you to still be in the mood you were in when you wrote it. It just sits there, true, waiting to be useful — for spotting that this keeps happening on the same day of the week, for remembering why you were short with someone that evening, for reconstructing a stretch of time you have otherwise lost.

That durability is the whole case for writing facts first. A record you can only interpret while still holding the original feeling is a record that expires the moment the feeling does.

What a bare fact leaves out

The honest complaint against fact-only logging is that it can read flat. "Meeting ran long, missed lunch" is true and also strangely quiet about a day that, at the time, felt like it mattered. Read back six months of entries like that and you get an accurate skeleton with none of the weight still attached — a list of things that happened to someone, without much sense of what any of it cost them.

So the instinct to add feeling is not wrong. The mistake is usually in how it gets added.

Rating a mood is the part that goes stale

The common fix is to bolt a mood onto the fact — a number, a scale, a colour standing in for how the day felt on its own. This is the part that ages badly. A "3/5" or "felt bad" attached to an otherwise specific line tells you almost nothing when you read it back later, because it was never anchored to anything. It was a summary judgment made in the moment, and moment-judgments are the least stable thing about a day. The meeting itself is still legible a year on. The number you slapped on top of it usually is not — you cannot even reconstruct what a 3 out of 5 was measuring.

Worse, a mood rating turns logging into a small verdict on the day, which is exactly the kind of pressure that makes people stop writing altogether once a string of low numbers starts to feel like evidence against them.

The feeling is usually already in the fact, if the fact is specific enough

The better fix is not to log two things instead of one. It is to write the fact with enough particularity that it carries the feeling without narrating it. "Meeting ran long, missed lunch, snapped at Dana over nothing" is still a fact. It is just a more honest one, and it does not need a mood score bolted on because the weight is already in the sentence. Compare it to "meeting ran long — frustrating." The second version spends words explaining a feeling in the abstract; the first shows you the specific damage the feeling did, which is the part worth having later.

This is less a rule about adjectives than about precision. "Rough day" tells you almost nothing on rereading. "Rough day, the kind where I kept starting things and not finishing them" tells you what rough meant, that day, concretely enough to still mean something once the feeling itself is long gone.

A line that will still mean something later

If you want a working rule: write down what happened, in language specific enough that a reader who was not there — including your own future self — can tell what it cost or gave you. Let one exact word carry weight when it earns its place ("relieved," "furious," "the first quiet evening in weeks") rather than reaching for a rating every time. You do not need a feeling attached to every entry. Plenty of days are just what they were, and a plain fact is a complete entry on its own.

TimeMap keeps this simple on purpose: a line of text, a time, and a category colour — nothing that asks you to score how the day felt. Nothing forces you to rate a moment before you are allowed to record it, so you are free to write the fact plainly and let it carry whatever it needs to carry.

Read back far enough and the pattern shows itself either way. A month of specific facts tells you more about what a season of your life actually felt like than a month of numbers ever will, because the facts are still standing when the numbers have gone quiet.