A 10-minute end of day report from your own records
An end of day report answers four questions for someone who was not watching you work: what is done, what is in progress, what is blocked, and what happens tomorrow. It goes wrong when it is written from memory at 6 p.m., because the morning is already blurry and the afternoon is whatever you were just doing. The faster route is to pull the facts from records first, then spend the ten minutes on wording and on deciding what the reader should not see.
What the reader of the report wants
A manager or a teammate reads an end of day report to decide whether they need to do anything. They want to know what shipped or can be relied on, what is still moving and when it will land, what is stopping you and whether you need their help, and what you will start with in the morning. Hours at the keyboard are rarely the point, and a list of every task you touched makes the one blocker harder to find.
That gives the report a fixed shape of four short parts. Done holds outcomes that someone else can check, such as a merged change, a sent document or a fixed bug. In progress holds work that has a state you can name, such as written but not reviewed. Blocked holds only things that need someone else, with the name of that person or system. Tomorrow holds one to three starting points, not a plan for the week.
A template you can paste
Keep it to a screen. A plain-text version works in chat, email or a ticket comment without formatting surprises.
Done: two to four lines, each starting with the thing and ending with where it can be seen. In progress: one line per item with its state and what remains. Blocked: one line per item, saying what you are waiting for and from whom, and what you will do in the meantime. Tomorrow: the first thing you will open, and at most two more.
Two habits make the template work. Write outcomes, not activity, so “fixed the export button clipping on narrow screens” instead of “worked on the export page”. And keep unfinished work out of Done, even when it took the most time; a report that blurs done and in progress is the one people stop trusting.
Fill it from records in ten minutes
Spend the first three minutes on facts. Open the day in whatever timeline you have and list the named stretches: the repository you stayed in, the document you edited, the meeting that took the afternoon. Then check what the repository kept with the commit log for the day, and look at what is still uncommitted. A commit is something you can point at; a change sitting in the working tree is in progress, not done.
Spend the next four minutes sorting those facts into the four parts. Put checked outcomes under Done. A commit, a sent message or a closed ticket can support that, depending on what the task required. Anything started without a result goes under In progress with its state. Blockers usually come from messages you are waiting on, which no activity record can show, so write them from your own head and check your inbox once.
Use the last three minutes to cut. Remove the third item that nobody will ask about, merge small fixes into one line, and make sure Tomorrow names a file or a page rather than “continue work”. If you write the report in the same ten minutes every day, the sorting gets fast because the parts never change.
What Hina's daily report gives you
Hina (赏月 in Chinese) is a Mac app that records which apps you used and for how long, plus window titles and page paths once “Record window titles and page paths” is on, and builds a daily report from that and local git history. The report is Markdown. It opens with time at the keyboard, plus deep work and commit counts when there are any, then Work that day lists local commit subjects, What you asked AI, and Recorded activity for each project. Under Confirmed outcomes it lists local version tags only, and says that a tag confirms the tag, not a release. Under In progress and unconfirmed it lists repositories with uncommitted changes or commits ahead of the local tracking ref, repositories with commits but no tag, and, when agent sessions are read, your latest visible request to an AI tool if no commit followed it within half an hour.
That maps onto the template. Confirmed outcomes and commit lines can feed Done after you check them, In progress and unconfirmed feeds In progress, and the Worth a look and Rhythm of the day sections tell you whether the day went somewhere unexpected. Hina has no Blocked section, because activity records cannot tell who or what you are waiting for. The detail sits under a collapsible Evidence heading: on a day with at least three commits a through line first, then a Projects table with time, commits and workspace state, a part for each busier repository with its local commit record and, when agent sessions are read, what you asked AI, the files touched, commands you ran if you turned on shell history, and an Other activity part for apps outside work and the sites you visited. When some records could not be fully read, one sentence above Evidence says the report may be incomplete, so a gap is stated instead of hidden.
Three Settings switches decide what the report can see beyond app names: Record window titles and page paths, Read agent sessions and Read shell history, all off until you turn them on, and Project folders used in reports, empty on a fresh install, tells it where to look for git repositories. Once the trial ends, the daily report needs a license, including for today.
Copy or export, then edit before you send
At the bottom of the report window there are two buttons, Copy and Export Markdown. Copy puts the full Markdown on the clipboard, and Export Markdown opens a save dialog with a name like report-2026-10-03.md, using the date of the day you are viewing. Both give you the complete text, including the evidence part, even though the window folds the evidence by default. A report is kept for ten minutes and then rebuilt in the background, and while the window shows Refreshing, both buttons wait for the new version.
Treat that text as raw material. Paste it into your notes, delete everything except the lines that belong in Done, In progress and Tomorrow, add your Blocked line, and rewrite the commit-flavoured sentences into outcomes the reader recognises. A generated line like “this confirms commit evidence, not delivery” is accurate for you and unhelpful for a manager. The report counts deliverables conservatively on purpose, so some real outcomes will sit under In progress until you move them yourself.
The day in Hina runs from 4 a.m. to 4 a.m., so work after midnight lands in the day you would call today.
What not to paste
The report is built from local records, which means it can contain things that were fine on your screen and are not fine in a channel. The Evidence part quotes commit subjects, and so does Work that day, so a subject that names a client or an unannounced feature reaches the top half too. With Read agent sessions on, your own requests to AI tools are quoted, in Work that day and, for the latest one, under In progress and unconfirmed. Files touched shows paths inside each repository, prefixed with its name. Other activity lists window titles for apps outside work and the sites you spent time in. Hina's privacy settings can blank titles for private windows, password managers and any words you list, but only from the moment you set them. Check the report with that in mind before it goes anywhere shared.
A safe default is to send your own four parts, never the Evidence section, and to reread any quoted commit subject or request you kept from the top half. If a title or a repository name is sensitive, rewrite the line instead of trimming it halfway. The Copy button's tooltip says the content comes from local records only, which describes where it came from, and once you paste it into a chat tool or an email, that tool's rules apply.
How this differs from a standup answer
A standup answer is spoken, covers yesterday, and can be vague about the edges because people can ask. An end of day report is written, covers the day just ended, and has to stand on its own when read the next morning by someone who was not in the room. The facts underneath are the same, so one pass over the records can serve both.
If your problem is the spoken version, the article on answering what you did yesterday at standup covers it in more detail. If you want a running note for yourself rather than one for a manager, the one on keeping a work log without writing all day fits better, because it optimises for your own next step and does not need to look finished.