Five questions your notes can answer once they have dates.

Search answers one question, and it answers it well: where did I write this word. That is genuinely useful and it is not usually the question you have. The questions people actually arrive with are about rate, company, onset, direction, and absence, and none of those are string matches.

All five become answerable once entries are dated and the things in them have names. Here they are in the order they tend to come up, with what each one looks like when a few months of notes exist behind it.

1. How often does this actually come up.

The impression you carry around is not reliable. Something that ruined two consecutive Fridays feels constant, and something that quietly interrupts you every ten days feels rare, because interruption is memorable and frequency is not.

The denominator is the part people skip. A count of mentions rising is meaningless if you also started writing three times as often, so any honest answer to "how often" needs the number of entries beside it.

2. What shows up alongside it.

Two things that keep appearing in the same entry are related in some way, and often in a way nobody wrote down explicitly. This is the question that finds the connection you did not know you had made.

Read that carefully, because it is easy to over-read. The overlap says the two things were on your mind at the same time on nine days. It does not say one caused the other. What it does reliably is tell you where to look, which is worth a great deal when the alternative is remembering.

3. When did this start.

The onset question is the one that arrives during a postmortem, phrased as "how long has this been going on", and it is the question a ticket system answers worst, because the ticket was opened when somebody finally escalated rather than when the problem began.

The seventeen days are the entire value of keeping the log. They exist because somebody wrote one sentence on a day when it did not seem to matter, and because that sentence contained the hostname rather than "the tunnel".

4. Is the number moving.

A measurement written into an entry is worth more than the entry it sits in, because measurements accumulate into a series. One reading tells you the state on a Tuesday. Thirty readings tell you a direction, and a direction is what supports an argument.

Note what the chart is made of. Nobody opened a metrics tool or filled in a tracking spreadsheet. Eleven people-shaped sentences happened to contain a number and a unit, and the series was read back out of them afterwards.

5. What did you quietly stop doing.

This is the one nobody asks, because you cannot search for an absence. Search needs a term and the whole point is that the term stopped appearing. It is also the question that most often changes somebody's mind about their own year.

Three of those four rows are things that fell off without a decision being made about them. Some of that is healthy, because work finishes. Some of it is a project that quietly lost its owner, or a person you have stopped talking to, and both of those are worth knowing before somebody else notices.

What none of this gives you.

Every answer above is bounded by what you wrote. The frequency counts are counts of mentions, not of occurrences, so a problem you stopped bothering to write about will look like a problem that stopped. That is a real blind spot and it points the wrong way, because the things you stop writing about are often the things you have given up on rather than the things you fixed.

Co-occurrence is correlation and nothing more. Two names sharing nine entries can mean one caused the other, or that both were symptoms of a third thing, or that they happen to occupy the same afternoon of your week. Treat the overlap as somewhere to look rather than as a finding.

And all five questions need the names to be in the prose. If your entries say "the usual problem", every chart on this page is empty. Naming things as you write is the habit the whole thing rests on, and the first article below is about how to build it.