The workshop journal — Carnet d'atelier — is the piece that took longest to design. Not because it's complex. Because we had to decide what to leave out.
What it holds
The journal keeps raw traces of your activity: the active window title, the inferred project (if recognized), the duration of the block. Nothing else.
No screenshots. No keystrokes. No mouse position. No list of apps running in the background.
Just: at 2:23 p.m. you were in Figma on a file named Bernier — final mockup, for 47 minutes.
What it doesn't hold
No idle log. If you spent two hours reading a book beside your keyboard, the journal recorded nothing.
No web history. Your browser is a browser. The journal doesn't read its tabs.
No biometric data. No webcam. No microphone. Ever.
When it erases
The journal keeps 14 days by default. After 14 days, entries that haven't become grains (billed units) are automatically purged. Permanently. Not to a trash folder. Deleted.
You can reduce to 7 days. You can extend to 30. Not more.
Why 14
Because it's the typical window in which a freelancer thinks ah, there was that block from last Tuesday I didn't bill. After two weeks, if you haven't caught it, you won't.
Keeping longer accumulates a memory debt that no longer helps — and which, in the event of a hack, theft, or subpoena, exposes weeks of your activity to a third party.
The central move: restitution
The main action in the journal is restitution. You drag a raw entry onto a project, tick billable, optionally add a description. The entry becomes a grain attached to the project.
The grain is saved permanently (or until you delete it). The raw entry stays visible in the journal, marked restituted, but won't leak into a forgotten archive.
The principle
The journal is a journal that remembers then forgets. It captures so you can bill. It forgets so nobody can re-read six months of your life.
Two promises holding together: useful memory and oblivion by default. Drop either and the tool becomes either useless or dangerous.
— Patrick