Recollecting worklog context

Reading, not writing. The journal is a scratchpad: half-sentences, bare links, notes-to-self. The job is to reconstruct what was being worked on, why, and what has since moved — never to append to the vault (that's updating-worklog-vault) and never to guess at state the pages don't record.

Core recipe

cd ~/worklog
date +%F                       # never take today's date from memory
ls Journal/ | tail -15         # dates are SPARSE: no entry ≠ no work
cat Journal/2026-09-14.md      # the anchor page the user named

Then read the 2–4 populated entries before the anchor, in full — entries are short, and excerpts lose the notes-to-self that carry the intent.

for f in Journal/2026-09-11.md Journal/2026-09-10.md; do echo "=== $f ==="; cat "$f"; done

Follow the trail outward only when the journal points there: a wikilink, or a topic page whose name matches a thread (rbf-improve.md, failure-modes-aug27.md, simtest/<job-id>.md).

rg -l 'dense traffic' --glob '*.md' .   # topic pages carrying a thread

What to pull out of a page

Bucket	Looks like
Todos	Today: / Today you are: / You are: lists, - in prog
Assignments	"X wants…", "Todos from X", meeting residue
Insights	prose paragraphs, hypotheses, notes-to-self ("you gotta…")
Problems	bare triage/Slack/video links, often with a one-line verdict under them
Bets	tables mapping situation → response → proposed fix
Runs	pasted commands with tag=, launch times

A bare link with a scribble under it is a finding — that scribble is the whole diagnosis. Quote it.

Reporting the evolution

Compare the anchor against the earlier entries and name the arc, not just the deltas. Typical shape: diagnose → structure into bets → execute a subset.

1. One short paragraph per earlier day: what was in flight, with the concrete artifact (command, table, link) that proves it.
2. A then/now table for the todos themselves — what got promoted, demoted, sharpened, or absorbed into a run.
3. Name what silently dropped. Items listed earlier and absent now are the highest-value output; say they're unpicked rather than letting them vanish.
4. Flag external pressure that reordered priorities ("X wants this solved") and new collaboration angles separately from self-directed work.

Rules

• Never invent progress. If a page doesn't say an item finished, it's in-progress or unknown — say which.
• Sparse dates: "end of last week" means the last populated entries, not Thu/Fri by calendar. State which dates you actually read.
• No git. ~/worklog isn't a repo; the dated files are the only history.
• Attribute per-day, so the user can tell Thursday's thinking from Friday's.
• Quote their phrasing for hypotheses and self-directives — the wording is the memory hook.