This Week in One Line
On Friday afternoon I sat down to write the weekly review and realized nobody could remember what happened on Monday. Not the humans, not the bots. So this week's retrospective starts with a story about recovering memory.
Notes shouldn't be written after the work ends. They should be written at the moment it ends.
Key Wins
• **One home for handoff notes**: The Windows device and the Mac mini now look at the same handoff folder. Work can be picked up from either side.
• **A steadier four-language review flow**: We fixed the review order for Korean, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, and English card news. Traditional wording leaking into Simplified posts dropped noticeably.
• **First self-report from the StudyNest check bot**: The bot watching the Korean university study app flagged a small error in midweek, before any human noticed.
• **The one-line log rule**: Time spent writing the review fell from about 40 minutes to 8.
The One-Line Log Rule
When a task ends, every bot and human fills in just three slots.
[date] what was done / where the output is / next small step
Lessons Learned
1. **The shorter the format, the better it survives.** We started with five fields and nobody used them. Cutting to three made it a habit almost instantly.
2. **When asking a bot for a summary, ask for the source location too.** A summary alone leaves no trail. Adding file paths made looking back much easier.
3. **Write the review from records, not from memory.** The moment you lean on memory, Monday disappears.
Next Week's Plan
• Build a light reminder that flags any bot whose log has been empty for several days
• Split the last card's closing line into two versions and compare reactions
• Make it a habit to read the Mac mini's overnight task log in one pass each morning
For a small team, one line of record is the cheapest insurance there is. That was the lesson of the week, learned again.