Work diary recipe: Slack times channel + Calendar + Todoist
A normal workday leaves three trails in three different places. Your calendar holds the meetings. Your task manager holds what you decided to finish. The running thoughts, the half-formed reactions, the “this is harder than it looked,” live nowhere unless you put them somewhere on purpose.
There is one obvious place to put them: a #times-yourname channel, an old convention from Japanese engineering teams. A personal channel where you narrate your day, in fragments, as it happens. Layer that on top of Google Calendar and Todoist and you have the closest thing to a written work diary that does not require sitting down to write one.
This is the recipe.
What a “times” channel is
You create a personal channel and post to it through the day, the way you might think out loud at a desk: “index freshness seems suspect,” “stuck on the OAuth scope thing again,” “PR almost ready,” “lunch was good.” Most entries are one line. The bar to narrate a workday in real time drops to almost nothing, which is why the convention spread.
The catch is the same as anything in chat tools: it scrolls away. On a free workspace tier most of it is gone within 90 days (see Your Slack conversations are disappearing for the policy). What makes the stream worth feeding into a diary is the rawness of what it captures: the inner version of the workday, before any cleanup.
deariary folds the day’s posts from selected channels into your diary entry. The stream stops being ephemeral, and the times log becomes one of three feeds the entry is built from.
What each feed adds
The three pieces of this recipe each cover something the other two miss.
Times channel: the inner monologue. What you noticed. What you got stuck on. What you decided to leave for tomorrow. The texture of how the work felt, not what it produced. This is the layer that disappears when people try to keep a work log by hand, because you cannot remember at 6 PM what you were quietly muttering to yourself at 11 AM.
Google Calendar: the structure. When the meetings were. How long they ran. What was a focus block versus a 1-on-1 versus a holiday. The calendar is the spine that everything else hangs on, because it gives the day a sequence. “You were stuck on OAuth right before the design review” is a different sentence from “you were stuck on OAuth all afternoon.” Only the calendar tells you which one was true.
Todoist: the intent and the close. What you set out to finish. What was completed. Which items slid into tomorrow. The times channel captures the inner version of the day; Todoist captures the outer version, the items you decided to count as finished. Read together, those two layers describe how the day actually turned out, not just how it felt or how it ended on paper.
The combination has almost no overlap. Calendar tells you when. Todoist tells you what you completed. The times channel tells you what you were thinking while it happened. Three angles on one day.
What a stacked entry looks like
A normal workday with all three connected might leave raw data like:
09:00 Calendar: Standup (15m)
09:20 times: "back to the migration script, last bit was the
transaction boundary"
10:30 times: "ok the deadlock is real, not me misreading the logs"
11:15 Calendar: 1-on-1 with Hana (30m)
11:50 times: "good 1:1, agreed to drop the second epic for this sprint"
12:30 Lunch
13:30 times: "fresh brain. trying the savepoint approach"
14:10 times: "that worked. running it on staging now."
15:00 Calendar: Design review: invoice flow (1h)
16:15 times: "review went long, three open questions for next time"
Todoist: Completed "Migration script: handle deadlock case"
17:30 times: "calling it. invoice refactor task slips to tomorrow."
Todoist: Did NOT complete "Refactor invoice generator"deariary reads the three feeds and weaves something like:
The morning opened with standup, then straight into the migration script you had left on Monday. By 10:30 you confirmed the deadlock you had suspected was real, not a logging artifact. Hana’s 1-on-1 came right before lunch and ended with a clean call: drop the second epic from this sprint and accept the smaller scope.
After lunch the savepoint approach worked on the first try, which surprised you a little. You had it running on staging by mid-afternoon. The design review for the invoice flow ran long and left three open questions. The migration ticket finally closed; the invoice generator refactor you had planned for the day did not land and rolled into Wednesday.
One entry. The calendar gave it shape (standup, 1-on-1, design review). Todoist supplied the close on the migration task and the slip on the refactor. The times channel filled in the in-the-moment shifts: that the deadlock was real, that the 1-on-1 ended cleanly, that the savepoint worked first try, that the day ended with an honest call about what would not finish.
A calendar-only entry would read like a meeting list. A Todoist-only entry would say “closed one task, missed one.” The times-channel-only entry would be a stream with no structure. The stacked entry says what the day was.
Set up the recipe
Three connections, in a sensible order.
1. Create the times channel (5 minutes)
In a workspace you control, create #times-yourname. Private (just you) or public (teammates can follow) both work. The Slack integration guide covers which workspaces are appropriate sources for personal diary data.
Post the first line. “Trying the times-channel thing.” Setup done.
2. Connect the three integrations to deariary (under 5 minutes)
Open the integrations panel:
Google Calendar. Paste the secret iCal URL. Events from the previous day form the temporal backbone of each entry. See the Google Calendar guide for exact data scope.
Todoist. OAuth, read-only. Only completed tasks are pulled in; pending tasks, comments, due dates, and shared collaborator data stay private. See the Todoist guide for the full breakdown.
Slack. OAuth into the workspace, then select the times channel during setup. You can add other personal channels later if you want them folded into the same entry.
The next morning, the diary pulls from all three.
3. Build the times habit (a couple of weeks)
The connections are instant; the habit takes a little longer. Three things that help:
Keep the bar at zero. “stuck on this” is a post. “ok that worked” is a post. Drafting and deleting means the bar already drifted too high.
Post at transitions, not inside blocks. Right before a meeting, right after, when you sit down after lunch, when you switch tasks. Transitions are when you have a thought worth catching and a few seconds to type it.
Re-read your own diary entries after a week. This closes the loop. Once you see what your fragments produce inside a finished entry, the next week’s posts sharpen without effort.
What this costs
This recipe needs three integrations running at once, which lands on the Basic plan or above. The Free tier is enough to test any one of the three by itself first, which is a reasonable way to decide whether the stack is worth the upgrade before connecting all three. Current pricing lives at deariary.com.
Where this recipe shines and where it does not
This stack is built around a specific kind of workday: a knowledge worker who runs their schedule through Google Calendar, plans through Todoist, and is willing to keep a personal Slack channel.
It works well for:
- Engineers and designers on teams where times channels are already normal. The friction is already gone.
- Solo founders and consultants. A workspace you control is yours to shape, and a times channel doubles as a useful daily log even before deariary is involved.
- Anyone who has tried and abandoned a manual work journal. Posting one line at a time is the lightest possible writing habit, and the entry composed from those lines is the one you would have written yourself at 6 PM if you ever did.
It works less well for:
- People whose calendar lives elsewhere. Outlook, Apple Calendar, and other systems can sometimes export to Google or to an iCal feed, but if your calendar is locked inside a corporate Microsoft 365 tenant, the structure layer of this recipe is missing.
- People who do not finish work in Todoist. If your tasks live in Linear, Trello, GitHub Issues, Asana, or in your head, the intent layer needs a different source. Linear is live; other task tools are on the roadmap.
- People with no place to put a times channel. The recipe needs a workspace you control or one where the convention is welcome. Without that, the stack collapses to Calendar plus Todoist, which is still useful but loses the in-the-moment layer.
What this recipe is replacing
If you have ever tried to keep a work journal at the end of the day and stopped after a week, the reason is almost always the same: you cannot remember at 6 PM what you were thinking at 11 AM, and the day’s interesting parts evaporated somewhere between the two. The times channel solves the memory problem at the source, by writing fragments down at the moment they exist. Calendar and Todoist add the structure and the close. The diary is what holds them together so that in three months you can read what you were doing on a particular Tuesday and have the day come back, the meetings and the tasks and the thinking that happened around them, in something that reads like a paragraph instead of three browser tabs.
