I’ve tried every approach to tracking practice. Spreadsheets with rep counts. Voice memos. Detailed journals. Rating systems. Apps designed for athletes. Pages of notes written immediately after sessions while my observations were still fresh.
I used none of them consistently for longer than three weeks.
Then I landed on something so minimal that it felt almost pointless, and I’ve used it every session for over a year.
Three sentences. Written in a small notebook that stays next to whatever I’m working with. Sometimes written on my phone if I’m traveling and the notebook isn’t close. Never longer than three sentences. Never shorter than three.
That’s the whole system.
Why Elaborate Logging Fails
The problem with detailed practice logs is the same problem with any elaborate system: the maintenance cost has to stay lower than the value it delivers, or you abandon it.
When I was designing complex tracking systems, the tracking itself was becoming a thing I had to prepare for and wind down from around each session. A session that would take forty minutes was turning into a sixty-minute event once I accounted for setting up the log beforehand and filling it in afterward. The overhead was real.
More fundamentally: detailed logs produce more information than you need. The point of tracking practice is not to accumulate rich data about every session. The point is to carry enough context from session to session that each session can be directed rather than random.
What I actually need to carry forward is much smaller than what I was trying to capture. I need to know: did this work? Did something specific not work? And what should I focus on tomorrow?
That’s it. Three answers. Three sentences.
The Three Questions
The structure is fixed. After every session, before I close the notebook, I answer three questions.
What worked today?
This isn’t about pride or self-congratulation. It’s about identifying what’s consolidating, what’s moving in the right direction. Maybe a specific movement finally clicked. Maybe the pacing on a sequence improved. Maybe I found a verbal frame that made the patter feel more natural. One concrete observation about what went in the right direction.
Naming this serves two purposes. First, it confirms to yourself that the session had value — something moved forward, even if other things didn’t. Second, it tells you what not to tinker with tomorrow. If something is working, the temptation is to keep adjusting it, adding to it, “improving” it. Noting that it worked is a reminder to leave it alone for now.
What didn’t work?
One specific problem. Not a general complaint (“I felt sloppy”) but an identifiable issue (“the transition between the first and second phase is losing rhythm when I rush”). The more specific the observation, the more useful it is. Vague problems produce vague practice. Specific problems produce targeted sessions.
This is also the place where honesty matters most. The natural tendency after a frustrating session is to downplay the problems, or to list too many of them (which makes none of them actionable). One problem. The most important one.
What is tomorrow’s single focus?
This is the most important sentence. Not a list of things to address. One thing. The singular priority for the next session.
This is where having noted one specific problem pays off: tomorrow’s focus is usually the answer to what didn’t work today. Sometimes it’s something else — the problem from today is noted and filed, and the priority tomorrow is something that needs attention even more urgently. But one focus. Only one.
The constraint forces a decision that would otherwise be left to the beginning of the next session, when the context is cold and the natural impulse is to just start running reps without a clear priority.
What This Does to the Next Session
Starting a practice session with a written single focus from the previous session is different from starting without one.
Without it, the session begins with a brief scan of what needs work, some initial reps to warm up, and then a gradual settling into whatever feels most natural or most urgent in the moment. This is fine, but it’s reactive. You’re letting the session find its direction rather than setting it.
With a written focus, you walk in with an agenda. The decision has already been made. You know what you’re working on and why. The session starts with intention and stays more directed.
It also removes a subtle cognitive tax. At the end of a practice session, your mind is often running a background process: “I need to remember that this is the problem, I need to come back to this tomorrow, I shouldn’t forget about this.” Writing it down transfers that process from your head to the notebook. You don’t have to remember it. It’s recorded. You can let it go and come back to it tomorrow.
This sounds trivial. It is not trivial. The cognitive peace of knowing that the important observation from today’s session is safely written down, that you will see it first thing tomorrow and not lose it, is real. It reduces the mental overhead of practice across time.
Traveling with This System
One of the most useful aspects of the minimal format is that it works anywhere.
I developed most of my practice habits in hotel rooms — evenings in Vienna, Graz, sometimes London, sometimes further afield, with a deck and a small surface and not much else. Elaborate systems don’t survive travel. The notebook gets left behind. The app requires setup. The voice memo gets buried in recordings from the day.
A notebook and three sentences survive everything. They’re the minimum viable version of tracking, and minimum viable is often exactly what’s needed when you’re working in the margins of a life that has many other demands.
I’ve written these three sentences in airport lounges, in the corridor outside a conference room after a keynote setup, in a car in a parking lot after a late evening session in a borrowed space. The format doesn’t require infrastructure. Just honesty and three sentences.
The Archive Value
Something I didn’t anticipate when I started this: over months, the three-sentence logs become a useful archive.
Not because I read them back obsessively. I don’t. But occasionally — when something is persistently not working, or when I’m preparing to bring a piece back into rotation after setting it aside — I’ll flip back through the recent entries and look for patterns.
A problem that keeps appearing in the “what didn’t work” column across several weeks is telling you something different from a problem that appeared once. The repeated problem is structural, not situational. It needs different treatment.
Similarly, flipping back and seeing what has moved from the “didn’t work” column to the “worked” column across time gives you a concrete sense of progress that’s easy to lose when you’re inside the daily grind of practice. Progress is slow and invisible until you can see the arc.
The three-sentence format is scannable. I can flip back through a month of entries in a few minutes. The constraint on length that makes it feel minimal is also what makes it useful as a reference.
On Perfectionism and Logging
One thing the minimal format does that I didn’t expect: it neutralizes perfectionism about the log itself.
With detailed journals, I would sometimes skip a session log because I didn’t have time to do it “properly.” Or I’d look at my notes from last week, decide they weren’t thorough enough, and feel vaguely guilty about the gaps. The log itself became a source of friction.
Three sentences can be written in ninety seconds. There’s no “properly” here. Either you write three sentences or you don’t. If you write three sentences that are not very insightful, you still wrote three sentences. The next session has something to work from. The system continues.
Imperfect consistency beats perfect inconsistency. Always.
That principle applies to the log and to the practice it’s tracking. The point is to keep moving forward, one session at a time, with enough structure to stay directed and not so much structure that the structure becomes the obstacle.
Three sentences. Every session. What worked, what didn’t, what’s tomorrow’s focus.
It’s not exciting. It doesn’t feel like a system. It feels like almost nothing.
That’s exactly why it works.