The Daily Energy Log I Built to Find Out What Charges Me

To keep a daily energy log, rate your energy a few times a day on a simple scale, tag what you were doing, and after about a week look at which activities line up with your highs and lows. I built Energy Battery to do exactly this. You drag a slider from red to green, tag the moment, and it turns your logs into a ranked list of what charges you and what drains you.

Quick disclosure before we go further: Energy Battery is mine. I built it and I run it. Logging is free, and the pattern screen is part of a paid tier I’ll get to. This is me showing you the tool I built for my own brain, not a pitch dressed up as a review.

I was already tracking my energy. In my head. Badly.

For years I ran a mental energy journal. “That meeting wrecked me.” “That walk helped.” “Why am I useless every day at 3pm?” I noticed these things constantly, and by the next morning every one of them was gone.

I never tried an app or a journal for it. I just kept winging it and losing the data. Notes in your head don’t add up to anything. So I built the thing I knew would help me: somewhere to dump those observations in two seconds, so they’d stop evaporating overnight.

The log takes about two seconds

Here’s the whole habit. Open the app, drag a slider from red to green to match your energy, tag what you were doing. Done.

There’s a little battery mascot named Spark who fills up with you, and a streak bar to keep you coming back. It’s cute on purpose. Two seconds and cute is the difference between a tracker you use and a tracker you abandon, at least for my ADHD brain.

The same trick runs my habit app. Dopamine Dealer Habits keeps the daily cost tiny so the streak survives the days you do not feel like it.

The free version keeps your last 7 days of check-ins, which is exactly enough to run the one-week experiment I’ll describe next.

What actually charges you and what drains you?

After you’ve logged for a while, the Patterns screen ranks your activities by what they do to your energy. Charges on one side, drains on the other, pulled from your own logs across days, times, and activities. This is the payoff screen, and it’s the Pro feature.

It’s also the screen where the app told me something I didn’t know about myself.

Talking to people charges me. Even a quick phone call. I’d have bet money a ringing phone was a drain. It sat there in my charges column anyway, log after log. I’d never have caught it on my own, because I wasn’t writing anything down. The pattern had to show me.

That’s the moment I built the app for. Not the logging. The part where your own data tells you something your gut had wrong.

Pro also keeps your full history instead of the last 7 days, and sends a recap email so the patterns come to you.

Why does it take a week to be useful?

The thing I’d flag before you try it: the Patterns screen means nothing on day one. Log twice and quit and you get nothing. It takes about a week of logs before the charges-vs-drains ranking is telling you something real about you.

That’s the reason the log is two seconds. A tracker only works if you actually make it through the first week, so the daily cost has to be almost nothing.

I’ll be straight about my own usage too. I logged hard for a few weeks, drifted, and now I dip back in when my energy feels off and I can’t tell why. The patterns it found me the first time still hold. The phone-call thing changed how I plan my day, and I learned it for the price of a week of two-second check-ins.

Who is a daily energy log for?

This is for the tracker crowd. If you already log habits or moods and you’ve never pointed a tracker at your energy specifically, this is the missing one. It’s for anyone who keeps noticing “that wrecked me” and “that helped” and never writes it down anywhere.

You don’t need a diagnosis or a system. You need a week and a slider.

Plans

Plan	What you get
Free	Unlimited check-ins, tags, Spark, streaks, and your last 7 days of logs. Enough to run the one-week experiment.
App Hub Pro, $7/month or $59/year	The Patterns screen (what charges and drains you), your full history, and recap emails. One Pro covers all five of my apps, not just this one.

An energy log only earns its keep when it tells you something you did not already know. That is the whole bet here: a week of two-second check-ins, and one thing in your charges column you would have gotten wrong.

Log your energy for a week

Start today, log two seconds at a time, and see what your week says about you. My money says at least one thing in your charges column surprises you. Free, no card needed.

Energy Battery is part of my App Hub, where the rest of my little apps live. If you want more of my origin-story builds, here’s another tool I built to fix a problem I kept hitting, the bill payoff tracker I built to gamify my side income, and the rest live in Digital Products.

Frequently asked questions