I built this for myself.

The problem

I'm an engineer. I have good days and bad days, and for a long time I couldn't figure out why. Some weeks I'd ship; other weeks I'd stare at my screen with no energy and no idea what changed. Some mornings I'd wake up sharp; some I'd be useless until noon. Sleep, caffeine, stress, food, exercise, season — everything plausibly mattered, and nothing obviously did.

I'm the kind of person who reaches for a tool. So I tried apps. Mood trackers ask you to rate one number a day; that loses everything that matters. Journaling apps want you to write paragraphs; I won't, especially on the bad days. Habit trackers count checkmarks; they don't tell you whether the habit is working. Spreadsheets are flexible but die from friction by week two.

What I actually wanted was something closer to what we build at work: a log. An append-only record of small events as they happened — mood, energy, what I was doing, anything else I suspected mattered — laid out densely enough that I could glance at a month and see what was going on. Capture in seconds. No streaks, no scores, no coaching. Just evidence.

That's what TriLog is.

Why this and not another mood tracker

TriLog is built around a different starting assumption than most apps in this space. Other tools assume you already know what matters and just need a place to record it. TriLog assumes you don't — and that the whole point of logging is to find out.

So the design is closer to a dashboard than a diary:

• The week, not the day, is the default view. Seven days × 24 hours on a single screen. Patterns that hide in a list of entries become obvious on a dense grid.
• Capture has to be effortless. Three taps. No typing required. The capture step has to survive a hard week, or the data dries up exactly when it would have been most useful.
• Log broadly, not narrowly. Mood, energy, activity, plus anything else you suspect matters — symptoms, supplements, focus, sleep onset, pain, productivity. The Pro Trackers feature exists for this.
• Notes are observations, not journal entries. "Bad sleep." "Back hurts." "Coffee with Alex." Three words you'd otherwise forget by Friday.
• Gaps are fine. Skipped a week? The data you already collected is still good. No streak to defend.

How I actually use it

A few times a day, when I notice a state change, I open the app and tap two or three things. It takes a second or two. Throughout the day I drop one-line notes — meals get tagged m, anything I might want to revisit gets tagged j so it shows up in the Journal view later. At night I tap Log Sleep before bed; in the morning I tap Wake Up. That's it.

What I've found in my own data, so far:

• My energy is more consistent than I thought it was. Most "bad" days are good days I misremembered.
• The real crashes line up with sleep onset more than total hours slept.
• I work fewer hours than I think I do, and I take fewer real breaks than I think I do.
• Wearable sleep trackers don't agree with each other, with me, or with reality — but my own logs do.

Nothing earth-shaking. But that's the point: the value isn't a single revelation. It's having an honest, queryable record of months at a time, instead of a vague reconstructed memory.

Who I think this is for

I don't think TriLog is for everyone, and I don't want to pretend it is. The people I think it'll be most useful for are:

• People with energy crashes, focus dips, or symptoms whose triggers are unclear, and who want to engineer the answer.
• People living with long COVID, ME/CFS, chronic migraine, autoimmune conditions, or other patterns-matter-a-lot situations — already keeping spreadsheets, already frustrated with single-purpose apps.
• ADHD or executive-function-focused people trying to figure out why some weeks work and others don't.
• Quantified-self veterans who want one tool instead of seven.

If you're looking for a calm wellness journal, streak gamification, or daily affirmations, this isn't that. There are good apps for those things — this is a different category.

Free, Pro, and what stays free

The core experience — mood, energy, activity, notes, journal, daily routines, the dense visual grid, weather, moon phases, cycles, habits, charts, CSV export — is free forever. No ads, no account, no analytics on your entries. It's the same set of tools I use myself every day.

TriLog Pro (30-day free trial, then $59.99/year or $7.99/month) unlocks the power-user surface: Trackers for anything beyond the core signals, Intake for structured logging of caffeine, supplements, and medications, Apple Health metrics (resting HR, HRV, sleep stages, weight), Quick Capture, periodic Polling, Pomodoro, Siri voice logging, entry locations, and an hour-by-hour Screen Time view that exists nowhere else. New subscribers get a guided Pro Setup wizard to pick tracker templates and turn on the views they want.

One person, one user

TriLog is a solo project. I'm the only one who works on it, I use it every single day, and I built it because I needed it. Nothing about your data leaves your device unless you tell it to (via iCloud backup or CSV export). I cannot see what you log. There is no server.

I'm at joe@trilog.app if you want to tell me what you've found in your own data, what's broken, or what's missing. I read everything.

— Joe Orr, New York

Other apps

TriLog is part of a small family of focused tools I've built — workout tracking, calorie tracking, punch-bag training. See them all →