At the end of a busy day, “I’m tired” may be all you have left to write. A small win, a distraction, an unexpected meeting: everything has blurred together.
Try spreading your notes through the day. Leave a sentence or two while a moment is fresh, look back with Dottie AI in the evening, and choose one thing to do tomorrow.
During the day: capture a specific moment
“I found the gap in the budget, but haven’t decided how to fix it” gives your future self more to work with than “busy all morning.”
Write a couple of lines after finishing something, when you get stuck, or before you stop work. For example:
- “Finally sent the application. Checking the attachments took longer than I expected.”
- “Planned to write, but kept looking for sources. Haven’t started the draft yet.”
- “Only focused for fifteen minutes, but got the opening down.”
The moment you remember most clearly is often enough. If a busy afternoon goes unrecorded, let it be. There is no need to spend the evening reconstructing every hour.
In the evening: check the review before the advice
Generate a daily review once you meet the requirements shown in the app. Dottie AI brings together relevant notes, tasks, and focus activity to help you look back. Check whether it captured what you accomplished before considering its suggestions.
Suppose the review says you made no progress, but you spent an hour agreeing on a direction with a colleague. Keep that experience in mind and skip advice that does not fit. You can add a note about the missing context for future reference; adding it will not automatically rewrite an existing review.
Use the same judgment with observations about stress, energy, or productive hours. Your notes may leave out context, and AI can misinterpret them. For questions about physical or mental health, a review cannot replace professional assessment.
For tomorrow: choose an action with a clear starting point
“Move the project forward” leaves the first step unclear. “Open the last draft and write three questions to clarify” tells you where to start.
Check the action you choose with three questions:
- What will I open, where will I go, or whom will I contact?
- What would count as finishing this step?
- Does it fit into the day I actually have tomorrow?
“Get back into exercise” could become “walk for ten minutes after lunch.” “Keep preparing for interviews” could become “choose one project and describe my part in it.” Put a task planned for the next day in Tomorrow and keep ideas without a date in Anytime.
One clear, manageable action is a useful result from a review.
After a while: look for a pattern
With a longer stretch of notes, weekly and monthly reports can help you notice recurring themes. Do certain tasks keep getting interrupted? Is a small habit becoming easier to start?
Choose one question to explore. Reports have time and record requirements shown in the app, and a few scattered notes may not reveal a pattern. Letting your notes accumulate is more useful than adding entries just to generate a report.
Try one review and see if it helps
Basic notes and AI chat are free, with limits on cloud usage. Free users can try one daily review in total, counted only when successfully generated and saved. Failed or canceled attempts do not count. Further daily reviews, regeneration, and weekly or monthly reports require Pro.
After trying it, ask yourself: did it help me understand a specific problem or find an action I want to take? Use it as often as it helps.
See the daily review guide for instructions. Before using cloud AI features, read the data processing information to understand how your data is handled.