HOURLY JOURNAL FOR ENTREPRENEURS
See where your founder hours actually go
Building a company can make a week disappear into meetings, decisions, deep work and unexpected fires. Hourly Journal gives you a lightweight way to name the hours as they happen, then see the week you really had.
Free to start on iOS, Android and the web. Journaling, tags, moods and insights stay free forever.
A clearer record of the working week
You worked twelve hours and can't account for four of them.
Meetings, Slack, a fire, another fire. By 9 PM the day is a blur, and the calendar only holds what was scheduled — not what happened in the gaps between.
Deep work keeps losing to whoever emailed first.
You blocked 9 to 11 AM for the roadmap. Around 9:20 it became a customer call. Nothing on the calendar records that trade, so nothing stops it happening again on Thursday.
“I have no time” is a sentence with no number behind it.
You can't tell whether the company is genuinely taking the whole week or whether it only feels that way. Logged hours give you Family next to Firefighting, this week next to last.
HOW THE HOURS GET LOGGED
One founder week, hour by hour
- 1
Tag the hour that happened, not the one you planned
When the 9 AM roadmap block turned into a customer call, log Firefighting. The distance between the calendar and the log is the thing you're looking at.
- 2
See where Firefighting lands in the day
The per-tag timeline shows which hours your fires fell in. For some founders they cluster after lunch; for others they don't cluster at all. It's your data either way, not a rule about founders.
- 3
Log the hours nobody invoices for
Family dinner, the hour you actually fell asleep, the Saturday you worked anyway. Leave those out and you're reading half a week and a flattering half at that.
- 4
Read the week as a count
Seven days in you can put the Deep Work total beside the Meetings total. It's a number to bring to your next planning session. It doesn't decide anything for you.
SUGGESTED TAGS
Tags that fit a founder's day
Five tags are usually enough to separate the hours you chose from the hours that chose you. Rename them, or write your own.
A DAY IN THE LIFE
A Tuesday between the roadmap and the fire
Five hours out of twenty-four. The other nineteen are in the day too — these are the ones a founder tends to argue about.
HOW IT WORKS
The parts of the app a founder leans on
- Put your Deep Work total next to your Meetings totalInsights breaks a day, week, month or custom range down by tag, and draws a timeline for each one.
- Keep founder hours out of your personal workspaceUp to three workspaces — Personal, Work and one more — is a Pro feature, each with its own colour and reminder schedule, lockable with a passcode.
- Log from the browser between callsapp.hourlyjournal.com runs the same journal on your laptop and stays in sync with the phone in your pocket.
The core journal is free forever on iOS, Android and the web. See what Premium adds.
What founders ask before they start
Will logging every hour slow me down?
An entry is a tag, a mood and an optional line of text, so most take a few seconds. You can also skip hours entirely — a partial day is still a usable record.
Can I log hours I missed?
Yes. Long-press to select a run of hours and write one entry that covers all of them, which is the usual way to catch up after a day that never had a pause in it.
Can I stop the reminder firing through my meeting block?
You set the wake and sleep times the nudge runs between — 5:30 AM to 10:30 PM by default — and the interval, in Journal Settings. All of that is free, so a standing meeting block is easy to route around.
Name the next block of work
You do not need to account for every minute. Start by naming the next block of work and let a more useful record build across the week.
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