19 Feb 2015
Belle

The origin of littlelogs

Josh has been building a Hello Code side project recently called littlelogs. We've just started inviting a few friends to help us test it, so now seems a good time to talk about where the idea came from and why we think it's valuable.

Daily recap

A few months ago Josh and I made a new channel in our Hello Code Slack team. It's called #dailyrecap. Every night we would each make an entry noting what we worked on for Hello Code during the day. If we'd had a meeting, worked on some code, answered support emails—it all went in our daily recap.

At the end of the month I used our recap entries to make notes in our monthly report of what we'd worked on during the month. Josh uses these reports to inform his monthly posts on this blog.

Recaps proved to be a good way for us to stay in the loop with what each of us were working on, and have a central place to refer to later to see what progress we'd made.

Daily logs

Our daily recap channel is internal and private. We translate most of what we write there into our monthly posts so our users can see what we've been doing but during the month the recaps can only be seen by us.

The other limitation with our recaps is that they're specifically for tracking the work we do for Hello Code. Everything else we work on is quickly forgotten because we don't keep logs of it anywhere.

Inspired by our daily recaps, I wanted a way to create short logs of everything I worked on. I wanted them to be public so Exist users could see how I spend my time. I wanted to be transparent, but also get some accountability to help me stay focused.

I looked at existing services that might fit thus need but couldn't find what I was after. I ended up using an old Twitter account I had to log what I was working on, using tags to categorise projects, tasks, and technologies. Here's a sample of what that looked like:

littlelogs

Josh was keen to try this too, and our friend Mia set up her own Twitter account for work logs. Although it was easy to post to Twitter throughout the day, Josh and I soon decided Twitter wasn't the best place for this, since it's more suited to conversations and the logs got lost among everything else going on.

After some discussion we decided building our own project to serve this purpose would be doable and made sense. It didn't take Josh long to put together a working prototype and we had a few people clicking on our signup button even before it did anything.

We have a small group of users helping us beta test the product now, and we're carefully seeding the community with people we know who work in various creative fields. We have developers, marketers, and writers, designers, and we're hoping to add musicians, artists, and other creatives in the future.

Having more users has already proven the social benefit of the product: the social side of littlelogs makes it a great place to discover people and projects you're interested in. We've also found very quickly that we're hanging out for commenting and liking on posts when we see our friends share what they're working on, so those features won't be far away.

If you're interested in trying littlelogs yourself, sign up for a beta invite.