SyrupLog: the 4 Burners habit on my phone

I used to carry a notebook everywhere. Hour by hour, I’d mark what I was doing and sort it into the 4 Burners: Work, Health, Personal, Social. It’s a simple idea. You’ve only got so much energy. Crank one burner up and another one cools off. Writing it down made that hard to ignore.

The notebook itself was the annoying part. It got crushed in my bag. I’d leave it at home. Some nights I’d fill in hours from memory and I wasn’t always honest about it. I already have my phone on me all day, so I figured I should just put the habit there.

That’s SyrupLog.

The name

I love waffles, so syrup felt right. Log is the logging part. And syrup is kind of the thing that holds the week together. Looking at all the hours in one place keeps me honest about where my time actually went.

What it is

It’s a small web app with a week grid, Monday through Sunday, morning to night. Tap a cell and it cycles through work, gym, chores, personal, social. If an hour was split, I can mark that too. It autosaves.

There’s a view for burner percentages and how this week compares to last week, plus a heatmap. Once a week I can run an audit that looks at my hours against the goals I wrote down. It’s blunt on purpose. I don’t need another app cheering for me.

Stack-wise: Next.js, React, TypeScript, Tailwind, Firebase Auth, Firestore. Google sign-in. Each week is one Firestore document, so loading it is basically one read. That was deliberate. I didn’t want this thing to feel heavy.

How I use it

I open the current week and fill stuff in as I go, or I catch up at night if I forgot. Sundays I look at the burners and decide what next week needs more of. Same habit as the notebook. Just not on paper.

I didn’t build SyrupLog to invent some new system. I already had one. The tool was getting in the way. Now it lives on my phone and I don’t have to dig a bent notebook out of my backpack.