I began writing things down about two or three years ago. It wasn't a morning routine. I wasn't chasing productivity. Things were simply very bad. In roughly six months, I had to shut most of the food & beverage businesses I ran. Almost everything went with them. Then came something very close to bankruptcy... Creditors one meeting, a lawyer the next, a liquidator after that... Another call... Another problem... Each day brought more bad news, and it never got better. Nights were the worst. I had panic attacks. I had thoughts of self-harm.
Some nights, I put on self-affirmations or gratitude recordings just to break into what was going on in my head. The gratitude recordings did help now and then. You repeat lines like:
I am grateful for the air I breathe. I am grateful that I am alive. I am grateful that I made it through today.
But when you're that far down, you don't remember to do it. You only reach for it when things are already terrible, when you're trying to force your mind to reset. It was never a practice. It was an emergency measure I kept forgetting I owned.
Three Small Wins
Somewhere in there, I understood that no one was coming to rescue me.
It wasn't a brave, motivational moment. It was just the plain fact of where I was. I had to work out how to get through.
So I set myself one tiny task.
At the end of each day, name three things I had won at.
Three was nearly impossible.
Some days, the only win was:
Woke up.
That was the entire list.
Another day, it was:
Had time for lunch.
I usually didn't, so lunch counted.
Sometimes, it was:
Played with my daughter.
That one mattered a lot.
Writing them down didn't save the businesses. The creditors didn't go away. The legal mess didn't sort itself out. The day could still be terrible.
It just stopped the awful parts of the day from erasing everything else.
That is the part I did not expect.
I thought I was keeping a list. What I was actually doing was interrupting a habit of self-erasure.
The bad news was loud. The small facts of the day were quiet. If I did not write them, they vanished, and the day became only what had gone wrong.
Learning to Notice What Was Already There
I posted the wins to an anonymous Twitter account that had nothing to do with my name.
Nobody knew it was me. I wasn't building an audience. I just needed a place for the lines, and a place that was technically public kept me a little accountable.
Slowly, something shifted.
I got better at noticing them.
One hard-won line became three. Then five. Then ten. Some days, fifteen.
The wins weren't getting bigger. I'd just stopped discarding them.
The day had always held more than one thing. In the beginning, I couldn't see any of it.
That is what the writing was really for.
I was not journaling to become a better person. I was asking a blunt question at the end of each day:
What actually happened, including the parts my head wants to delete?
Some nights, the honest answer was almost nothing. Some nights, it was more than I thought.
Either way, the page held it so I did not have to argue with myself in the dark.
In time, I stopped because I didn't need it the same way. I'd come through the worst of it.
Then it returned, for the opposite reason.
When Even a Productive Day Feels Empty
I got productive again.
Then AI arrived, and I got intensely productive: building, testing, chasing ideas, burning through tokens and quotas, getting an absurd amount done.
And still, I'd get to the end of the day and wonder:
What did I actually do?
The honest answer was usually a lot.
But my head wasn't tracking what I'd finished. It was already on the next ten things I hadn't.
So I picked it back up.
This time, it wasn't about surviving the day. It was about spotting the progress buried in all the activity.
The worst year and the productive year could not have felt more different.
Either one could vanish by nine at night.
The first got swallowed by everything that went wrong. The second by everything still left to do.
Same tool. Same three lines, or five, or fifteen.
Same small record that says:
This happened too.
A Record You Can Trust
None of this is pretending everything is fine.
Some days are bad. Some stretches are fucking awful.
The point is to leave yourself a note your future self can trust.
Not a highlight reel. Not a gratitude script.
Just a short list of facts the day tried to erase.
About the Author
Abhishek C George is a Singapore-based entrepreneur and writer. He moved from India to Singapore at sixteen and has been building businesses there since 2000. He keeps a public ledger of 66 things and counting. He co-founded Sago House, which was recognised among the world's 50 best bars. In 2026, he published What the Hell Is AI?, a plain-English book exploring artificial intelligence. His personal notebook can be found at 3 Wins.