It was a Tuesday night, maybe eleven, and I was trying to remember if the DoorDash run I did three weeks ago had actually been worth it or if I had just decided to remember it as worth it because I needed it to be. I had a number in my head — sixty-something dollars — but I also had a vague guilt about the gas and the parking situation on Zelda Road, and I could not tell you which one was real without documentation. I did not have documentation.

That's when I found the Notepad file. Not on purpose. I was looking for a snippet of code I'd written in 2021 and instead I opened a file called stuff_i_tried.txt that I apparently created in 2010 and have been intermittently adding to ever since. It had entries like "sold two things on eBay, $18 total, not worth the box" and "survey site, $4.75, took 45 min, never again" — and then nothing for eight months, and then more entries, and then nothing again. A complete and unflattering record of a guy who kept forgetting he'd already tried things.

I sat there reading it for longer than I should have on a Tuesday at eleven. And somewhere in that file was the answer to my DoorDash question, sort of. Not that run specifically, but enough context to know that the sixty-dollar memory was probably closer to forty-eight and a bad mood. That file has no system. It has no format. It has no categories. It is just a man writing things down before he lies to himself about them, and it is the most useful document I own.

The Reason I Started Writing It Down in the First Place, Which Was Embarrassing

The original sin was the Uber thing. I convinced myself, for about three months after I quit, that it had been a wash — not great, not terrible, more or less broke even if you didn't count the wear on the car, which I did not count because counting it was depressing. I told that story to a couple of people. I believed it.

Then I added it up. I wrote about how that actually went at some point, but the short version is: it was not a wash. It was the worst thing I had tried in terms of actual dollars returned for actual time spent, and I had been carrying a false memory of it for months because the true number was too small and annoying to keep in my head.

That's the thing about this stuff. Your brain is not a ledger. Your brain is a PR firm for your own decisions. It rounds up, it omits the gas, it forgets the hour you spent sitting in a parking lot waiting for a ping that didn't come. If you don't write it down at the time, you will remember the version that justifies the choice you made, and then you will make the same choice again because hey, it worked out okay last time.

I am not saying I became disciplined after that. I'm saying I became slightly less undisciplined, which is the only kind of growth I can actually confirm.

What Was Actually in That File When I Read It Straight Through

I read the whole thing that Tuesday night. It took about twenty minutes. Here is what it told me, roughly:

• I have tried more things than I remember trying.
• I have tried several things twice because I forgot I'd tried them.
• The things I remember as "fine" were usually not fine. The things I remember as "disasters" were sometimes actually fine.
• I wrote more honestly at eleven PM than at any other time, which probably says something about me and coffee.

There was an entry about a deal-stacking experiment where I spent an hour chasing a promo code across three different apps and saved eleven dollars. I had completely forgotten about it until I read the line: "not worth it unless you enjoy the game, which I kind of do, which is the problem." That is me at eleven PM, telling me the truth. The full story of that particular hour is its own thing, but the file version is just one sentence and it's more honest than anything I wrote later with context and paragraphs.

My oldest walked in while I was reading it, asked what I was doing, and I said I was doing accounting. They looked at the screen — a plain text file, no formatting, entries separated by blank lines — and said:

"That's not accounting. That's just a list of complaints."

I mean. Yeah. That is also what accounting is.

The file doesn't have every hustle in it. It has gaps of months where I either forgot to write things down or was too tired to open a text editor after a shift. The gaps are their own data. The gaps are the periods where I was probably telling myself the rosiest version of events, unchecked, because there was no record to argue back.

The Real Cost, Which Was Mostly Pride and One Specific Tuesday Evening

The file costs nothing to keep. It's a text file. It lives in a folder called misc on a laptop that has a cracked corner and stickers from three different conferences I attended and two I didn't. The file itself is maybe forty kilobytes. It has outlasted two laptops because I keep copying it over, which is the most archival behavior I exhibit in any area of my life.

What it cost was the Tuesday evening, and the mild discomfort of reading a sixteen-year record of optimism that didn't pan out. There's an entry in there from 2019 that I won't repeat verbatim, but it is a man who was very confident about something that did not work, and the follow-up entry six weeks later is three words: "okay that's done."

I also had to reckon with the fact that I'd been trying to add things up honestly for a while, and the file was the evidence that I had not always succeeded. Not because I was lying on purpose. Because I was tired, and tired people remember the number that lets them sleep, not the number that's accurate.

That's the cost. Not money. Just the specific embarrassment of being confronted by your own prior honesty when your current memory had gotten comfortable.

What I Still Do, Which Is Not a System, Just a Habit I Can't Seem to Kill

I still use the file. I added to it the same night I found it — wrote down the DoorDash run I'd been trying to reconstruct, with the actual number (forty-three dollars, two and a half hours, one very confusing apartment complex on the east side), and a note that said "Zelda Rd parking is a trap."

I don't write in it every day. I don't have a format. Sometimes it's a dollar amount and a time. Sometimes it's a sentence. Sometimes it's just a word or two that I know I'll understand later. The rule, if you can call it that, is just: write it down before you've had time to make peace with it. The version of events you write at eleven PM, still annoyed, still a little damp from the car, is more accurate than the version you'll tell someone at the bar on Friday.

Victor asked me once — this was a while back, over the phone — how I kept track of what was working. I told him about the file and he was quiet for a second and then said something like, "so you've been journaling." I told him it was not journaling, it was data. He did not argue but I could hear him not arguing. He keeps his own version of this, I think, just with better outcomes and fewer entries about parking on Zelda Road. He's written about judgment and tracking decisions over on his own side of things in a way that makes my Notepad file look like a cave painting, but the principle is the same: you have to have something to argue against when your memory starts revising.

I dropped the habit of trying to reconstruct things after the fact. If I didn't write it down that week, it goes in as an estimate with a note that it's an estimate, and I trust it less. That's it. That's the whole doctrine. Write it down or it didn't happen, and if it didn't happen, you'll try it again in six months and be surprised all over again.

The file is still open in a tab right now. Last entry is from four days ago: "surveys while build was running, $2.60, fine, whatever." That's the whole thing. That's the system. I'm not proud of it and I'm not embarrassed by it. It's just a list of complaints, like my kid said, and it's the most honest document I have.

Note: Everyday Hustle Jeff is the written side of a digital series. These accounts are composite and dramatized. Any figures are what they were on the day, for one person, and are not a projection, a track record, or advice.