Ask HN: How do you not keep track of what you did yesterday (and this morning)?

"I don't remember what I did yesterday." is shorthand for either "I was switching between lots of small tasks" or "I feel like I didn't make much progress and don't want to admit it". Neither is bad but devs don't like to be called out so they gloss over the details. A good scrum master knows what each dev has on the sprint board and they can prompt for more info if necessary, but generally it's fine unless it's near the end of the sprint and there's a hard deadline.

Voice memos. I feel like an old timey PI or wanna be author so it all works out.

I want to use this, but I have an extreme aversion to speaking into devices.

I don't think that's the case about it being pride. It's pretty common for intelligent people to immediately forget minutiae. The fact that folk completely forget work over the weekend means they're fresh for a new week. Throw taking care of small children into the mix, and there's zero room for anything extra rattling around.

"I don't remember what I did yesterday," seems more likely to really mean, "there's nothing that anyone cares about." It's an answer to the question that they wanted to be asked, i.e. "What does the team need to know about the progress of your work?" Framed in response to what they were actually asked, "what did you do yesterday?"

It's actually a pretty good response, assuming they're generally effective employees. They are avoiding wasting everyone's time conveying what they believe to be unnecessary information.

You can run a more effective startup by directly asking for status updates on important tickets rather than vaguely asking, "what did you do?" Ask for information, not a story. If you literally want folk to go into minutiae on something because you think it would be helpful, then ask them for that. "How did you solve that problem?" And they'll ramble on the whole meeting.

I highly recommend TimeSnapper ( https://timesnapper.com ) if you're a visual person, it lets you take occasional screenshots throughout the day and then play it back like a movie, super helpful for jogging my memory. I'm not associated with them, just a long time user - they used to have a free version which was pretty good but I paid for it when they introduced a Mac version. Also backtrack ( www.backtrack.team ) is pretty good for keeping notes in meetings.