The four lines we accept
Line one: clock windows where volume was unusual relative to the same windows last week. Line two: whether effort and result agreed in those windows. Line three: initiative, responsive, or empty for the session as a whole. Line four: one sentence you could read aloud to a sceptical colleague.
That is the whole of the daily note. Indicators you already understand can live on the chart; they do not need to be copied into the journal. Copying them is how the journal becomes a second chart.
Weekly, not nightly, when the book is quiet
If you only watch two sessions a week, do not fake five daily pages. Write a weekly participation note on Friday: which sessions had a crowd, which were empty, and whether you still confused a tall bar with relative volume. The reading circle is built on that Friday habit.
People who insist on a nightly essay usually arrive at Grey Street with three weeks of blank pages and a sense of failure. We would rather you keep the habit small enough to survive a half-term holiday.
What the follow-up call is for
After the two-day workshop the thirty-minute call is not a recap of the slides. There are no slides. We ask you to read three of your own four-line notes aloud. If the language has drifted back to ‘strong close’ and ‘weak close’, we put the participation words back in.
If you want help designing the journal before you sit the workshop, a chart review session is the better first step. Bring the journal you already have, however messy. Marcus would rather mark a real mess than a template you downloaded and never used.