Should you write other people’s real names in your daily log?

"Dinner with Sarah, she's still not talking to her sister" is a perfectly ordinary line to write about your own Tuesday. It is also, the moment it is written, a line about Sarah — her family, her conflict, her business — filed under your name instead of hers, and kept indefinitely without her ever agreeing to be in it. Most people never stop to notice this while they are writing quickly at the end of a day. It is worth stopping for, because the answer changes what a log is actually a record of.

A name is what makes an entry findable later

There is a real reason to name people rather than write around them. An entry that says "dinner with a friend" cannot later be pulled up by searching for anyone, because it never said who — and a log filled with unnamed friends, coworkers and family members eventually turns into a page of pronouns that even you will struggle to place. Writing the actual name is what lets a log answer, months or years later, "how much of last year did I actually spend with this person," instead of only "what did I do on this specific date." That is not a small convenience. It is most of what makes a log worth keeping past the first few weeks.

But naming someone changes whose entry it is

A line about you, with your own name attached, only ever implicates you — you can write "spent the afternoon avoiding a decision" and no one else is on the hook for that sentence. The instant a second name enters the line, the entry is doing two things at once: recording your day, and recording a fact about somebody who never chose to be recorded. "Dinner with Sarah" is harmless; it is just where you were. "Dinner with Sarah, who's still not speaking to her sister" is a different kind of sentence. It is not really about your evening anymore. It is about Sarah's family, kept under your name, in your handwriting, indefinitely.

What actually needs a name, and what doesn't

Most mentions of other people fall on the harmless side without any thought at all: who you had lunch with, who called, who was at the thing you went to. These are facts about your own day that happen to involve a person, and naming them is exactly what the earlier section argued for — it is what makes the entry findable as "everyone I've seen this month" later. The harder case is different in kind, not degree: a diagnosis that belongs to someone else, an argument you only heard one side of, a secret you were told in confidence, a decision that is really theirs to explain, if anyone ever does. That is content that happens to have reached you, not content about you, and writing it down under someone's real name turns a private log into something closer to a file kept on another person.

A rough test: whose day is the line actually about

The distinction that tends to hold up is simpler than it sounds: does this line describe something you did, felt, or noticed — with another person present — or does it describe something that happened to, or about, them, that you happened to be told? "Walked the dog with my brother" passes without a second thought. "My brother told me he's thinking about leaving his job" is a fact about your brother's life that you are the custodian of, not the author of, and it deserves more caution than a name on an ordinary Tuesday usually gets. Neither line is wrong to write. They just call for different levels of care, and treating them identically is how the second kind ends up sitting in a searchable log next to takeout orders.

A name, an initial, and a role are three different choices

Once the distinction is visible, the fix is usually a smaller decision than "name it or don't." For the ordinary, findable-later kind of mention, a first name is almost always right — it is specific enough to search for later and carries no more weight than saying it out loud would. For the kind of line that is really about someone else's private matter, a role often serves the entry better than a name: "my brother" instead of the name, "a friend" instead of which one. It keeps the fact locatable as part of your life without turning a private person into a permanent keyword. None of this is about hiding anything from yourself later — you will still know exactly who it was. It is about not making a name into a searchable label for someone else's hardest week.

This isn't about secrecy. It's about whose record this is

A daily log is a record of your own life, written from your own side of it. People are going to be in it constantly, by name, because they were genuinely there — and that is not a problem to solve, it is most of what makes the record worth having. The only thing worth pausing over is the narrower case where a line stops being about your day and starts being about someone else's business that you happened to witness. Naming the first kind freely, and being a little more careful with the second, is not a compromise on honesty. It is what keeps a log honest about what it actually is: your side of things, not a file on everyone in it.

Where TimeMap fits

TimeMap doesn't do anything special with names beyond storing whatever line you write, with a tag if you use one, and letting you find it again later. That plainness is exactly why the decision above is yours to make line by line rather than a setting to configure once — the app just keeps what you wrote. What you choose to write about somebody else is still up to you, every time.