The rain delayed us is only checkable if somebody wrote the rain down.
Three months after it happened, everything on your build is somebody’s recollection against somebody else’s. The bricklayer says he was stood down in the wind. The scaffolder says he was never asked. You are the one being invoiced, and you were there, and you cannot remember either. This is where the day goes at the time, in about a minute, so that it is still an answer in month twenty.
The days recorded on the build you can look round, newest first.
The weather is a sentence rather than a dropdown, because dry, showers, rain would refuse the entry that actually answers a claim for more time — froze hard overnight, thawed by ten, dig still full of water from Tuesday. It can be dry overhead and the ground still unworkable, and that difference is the whole argument.
Why it is not a notebook
A pad answers one question: what did I write on the fourth of November. Everything else means reading the year. Here the same day is recorded on nine strands, so the questions you will actually be asked — when did the blocks land, who was inducted, what did the engineer come for — are each one press, and the answer is every day at once.
The day
The weather, the state of the ground, and what the day was like — in your own words, not from a list of ours.
Who was on site
Which trades turned up and how many of them.
Plant on site
What machinery was there and how many.
Deliveries to site
What arrived, when, and what condition it was in.
Site visitors
The engineer, the architect, the inspector — who came and what they came for.
Health and safety
Inductions, toolbox talks, inspections, and anything stopped on safety grounds.
Incidents
Near misses, complaints, mud on the road — the things that get argued about later.
Commercial
Applications for payment, variations, and anything else with money attached.
What happened
Progress, milestones, delays, gaps in the drawings, and anything that was missed.
Every day that carries labour, read as one list — two bricklayers, sent home at eleven.
That row and the wind on the same day are what an application for payment gets read against. Neither of them is worth writing down on its own. Together they are a week you can account for.
What arrived, when, and the pack that came off the wagon damaged.
Twelve packs of blocks landed and one of them was broken. Written on the day, that is a credit. Remembered in March, it is a conversation you lose.
What was on site, and how many of it.
Who came, and what they came for.
The engineer was on site twice about the same rear corner. Read as a list, that is not a diary entry any more — it is a design problem with a date on it, and it was visible without anybody looking for it.
What it saves you
The questions arrive months later, from people who were not there, and they are always about a particular day.
Inductions, toolbox talks, inspections — and the lift that was stopped.
If something goes wrong on your site, the question is who had been briefed and when the scaffold was last checked. That is the same record as the safety paperwork, met from the other side: the plan says what was supposed to happen and the diary says what did.
The neighbour, the mud on the road, and the hour of daywork that was agreed.
What was applied for, and what is waiting on you.
A variation submitted and not yet priced is money you have not agreed to and may already be paying for. On this reading it is one line with a date, and it stops being something you were going to deal with.
Progress and delays on the same list, in the order they happened.
Two years of a build, closed down to two lines, and back out again.
Every reading rolls up to the year, the month, the week or the day. You open the part you are being asked about and leave the rest shut, which is what makes a two-year record usable at all.
Nothing here scores you. There is no percentage, no streak and no count of days you did not record. A week with nothing on it shows as a week with nothing on it, because the likeliest reason a day is missing is that nothing happened on it, and that is not ours to editorialise.
And the photographs go on the day, not in a folder
A photograph of an open trench is worth nothing in a folder called Photos. It is worth something when it is pinned to the day it was taken and says where on the site it was — the drainage run before backfill, the services under the slab, the wall before it was closed up.
Fifteen years from now somebody owns this house and wants to put a door where a beam might be. That photograph, on that day, with that location on it, is the answer. It travels into the pack you leave with, so it is still the answer long after you have stopped being the person who knows.
What you get out
A document of any period you like, laid out under the same headings you recorded it under. Three choices, and the second one is the one that matters.
How much of it
A day, a week, a month or a year. Pick any date inside the period you want.
Who it is for
Your own record keeps everybody’s contact details on it. The version you send carries your letterhead and takes theirs off.
The photographs
Off unless you ask, because a month with photographs in it can be too large to email.
The choices belong to the export. Nothing on that page is saved, and nothing there changes your record.
The same October sent to your bank, your insurer and your bricklayer should not carry the same contact details. The version you send goes out on your letterhead with other people’s numbers taken off it. The version you keep has everything on it.
Photographs are off unless you ask for them, and what prints is our reproduction of each one rather than your original file — a month of photographs is not something an inbox accepts. Your files stay your files, and they leave whole in the pack at the end.