At the end of most weeks I can name the two or three things that mattered. A launch, a migration that slipped, an incident I helped close. The rest of the week is mostly gone. Dozens of Slack threads, a handful of teams I helped unblock, calls I weighed in on. By Friday most of it has evaporated.

This bothers me more than it should. I want to see the pattern of my own work, whether I’m overachieving in some areas and falling short in others, what a whole quarter adds up to. Perf is part of that, but only part. Mostly it’s for myself, and my memory won’t give it to me. It keeps the recent and the large and lets the rest fall away.

So I tried to build the record by hand. First with existing tools that promised to show me where my week went. None of them fit. Then I built my own. A custom tool to catalog everything I did as I went, so nothing would slip.

I made it interactive. It polled other sources and pulled my activity from across the week, which meant auth keys for every system it read from and a polling loop to keep current.

That is where it came apart. Every interactive piece was one more thing to maintain. Auth keys expire, polling breaks, a source changes shape and the scrape comes back empty. The tool meant to save me the work of remembering became its own work, and the onus was still on me, now to keep the catalog alive.

I kept treating the forgetting as the problem and the tool as the fix. After I let the auth keys lapse a third time and didn’t notice for a week, I started to think I had it backwards. The friction was the tool fighting how I actually work.

Focusing on the recent and the high-impact is a reasonable way to move through a job. It’s probably the correct way. I don’t trust it, because it means giving up the full picture of myself, so I keep reaching for the catalog anyway.

Hundreds of Slack conversations a week, team after team, and I remember the ones I had to act on and lose the rest. Forgetting 90% of your day might be the working memory of someone making real choices about what’s worth holding.