notion-log

Personalization

This skill resolves placeholders against ~/.claude/state/personal_config.json. See _config/README.md and _config/personal_config.example.json for setup. If the config is missing or a needed field is unset, the skill must surface an error to the user and refuse to proceed rather than guess.

Project page IDs come from personal_config.notion.project_pages[<project>]. Off-limits pages (Weekly Agenda, Tasks DB, personal pages) come from personal_config.notion.off_limits_pages and personal_config.notion.tasks_db_id / personal_config.notion.weekly_agenda_page_id. Filesystem locations for project subdirs come from personal_config.paths.overleaf_root and personal_config.projects[].overleaf_subdir.

Purpose

Append-only diary for the user's active research projects in Notion. The user finishes a coding or writing session and wants a single timestamped paragraph at the bottom of the relevant project page recording what got done, with bullets for sub-items and a follow-ups: tail listing open todos surfaced in the summary.

This is a diary skill, not a task skill. It writes prose to a project page. It does not file todos (that's /log-todo), it does not process Telegram replies (that's /capture), it does not edit historical bullets in place (loses history — never do this).

When to invoke

Invoke whenever the user signals end-of-session reporting on a research project. Triggers include:

• /notion-log ProjectA: finished tertile robustness, started Section 4
• "log to notion: spent 2 hours on ProjectB identification section"
• "update notion with what I did on ProjectC today"
• "diary: ProjectD — added dataset descriptives"
• "append to project page"
• "end-of-session log for ProjectE"
• "session log: ProjectF pivot discussion with coauthor"
• "log my work on ProjectB"
• "note in notion that I finished the IV first stage"

If the user just describes work but doesn't say "log it," ask once whether they want it logged before doing anything — don't auto-log unsolicited.

Project page mapping

Map the project tag in the invocation to a Notion page ID, resolved from personal_config.notion.project_pages. The tag is whatever appears before the first colon (case-insensitive, common abbreviations resolved). Each project entry in personal_config.projects[] may declare aliases to absorb common shorthand.

Illustrative shape (the live mapping is driven by the user's config):

If the tag is ambiguous or unrecognized, ask the user once which project they mean, then proceed. Never guess silently — wrong-page writes are hard to undo because the skill doesn't read history before appending.

For context references inside log entries (file paths, repos), the canonical filesystem locations come from personal_config.paths.overleaf_root joined with personal_config.projects[*].overleaf_subdir, e.g. <OVERLEAF_ROOT>/<PROJECT_SUBDIR>/.

Workflow

1. Parse target project. Take everything before the first colon in the invocation argument. Lowercase, strip whitespace, look it up against the project table (resolved from personal_config). If no colon (e.g., "log my work on ProjectB"), pattern-match a project name out of the surrounding text. If still ambiguous, ask the user once.

1. Parse work summary. Take everything after the colon. If the message is a free-form description without a Project: prefix, after resolving the project name use the whole remaining text.

1. Detect follow-ups. Scan the summary for phrases like "still need to", "todo:", "next time", "follow up on", "haven't done X yet", "should X". Collect these as a comma-separated list for the follow-ups: tail. If none, omit the tail.

1. Compose the append entry. Use this exact shape:

   <YYYY-MM-DD> <morning|afternoon|evening|late-night> — <one-sentence summary>
   • <bullet 1>
   • <bullet 2>
   follow-ups: <comma-list>

Time-of-day is rough (morning before 12, afternoon 12–17, evening 17–22, late-night 22–04). Bullets are optional — only include if the work splits cleanly into multiple sub-items. A one-thing session is fine as a single line with no bullets.

Format dates as bold (**2026-05-11**). Format file paths and commit hashes as inline code. Format URLs as links.

1. Append via Notion MCP. Use mcp__notion__notion-update-page (or whichever Notion MCP tool appends children — check available tools at invocation time; the correct tool is the one that adds block children to an existing page without modifying existing blocks). Append a single paragraph block (or a small group: paragraph + bulleted_list_items + paragraph for follow-ups) to the END of the target project page. Do NOT modify existing blocks. Do NOT delete blocks. Do NOT touch the page's title or properties.

If the Notion MCP exposes a mention-date block primitive (e.g., <mention-date start="..." timeZone="America/New_York"/>), prefer that over a plain text date. If not, plain bold text date is fine.

1. Cross-link inline. If the summary mentions:

• A file path → render it as inline code.
• A git commit hash (7+ hex chars) → render as inline code, and if a repo URL is obvious from context, link it.
• A PR number (#123) → leave as plain text unless the repo is unambiguous.
• A Notion Tasks DB item ("task XYZ in the Tasks DB") → leave as plain text reference; this skill does not write to the Tasks DB and does not try to create cross-page relations programmatically.

1. Report back. Print to chat:

   Logged to <Project Name> page. <N> follow-up(s) detected.

If N > 0, append a one-liner suggesting /log-todo to file them as actual tasks. If N == 0, omit that line.

What to NEVER write to

These pages are explicitly off-limits for this skill, even if the user asks (confirm and refuse, or redirect to a different skill):

• Weekly Agenda (personal_config.notion.weekly_agenda_page_id) — that's the active todo surface; appending diary prose pollutes it. If the user wants a weekly recap, suggest a separate weekly-recap page or just write it as part of the relevant project page.
• Tasks DB (personal_config.notion.tasks_db_id) — that's /log-todo's territory. Diary entries are not tasks.
• Daily brief / today_brief.json pages — generated by /daily-brief, ephemeral.
• Meeting Notes pages — autogenerated by Notion's AI transcription, do not modify.
• Personal pages listed in personal_config.notion.off_limits_pages (e.g., grocery lists, cook lists, jokes, bucket lists, onboarding details, ongoing-thoughts pages that contain personal finance info).
• Idea-bank pages under Research that are not active projects (e.g., Natural Experiments, Substantive Areas, Methodology, Misc). These are quiet thinking spaces; don't auto-append diary entries there.

If the resolved page ID is not in the active-project map, stop and confirm before writing.

Examples

Example 1 — ProjectA progress log (with follow-ups).

Invocation:

/notion-log ProjectA: finished reproducing tertile robustness in Section 5.2, started writing the R2 response to Reviewer 2's identification concern. Still need to redo the placebo with the new bandwidth and email a coauthor about the panel data extension.

Resolved project: ProjectA → personal_config.notion.project_pages["ProjectA"].

Appended entry (rendered as Notion blocks):

**2026-05-11** afternoon — Finished tertile robustness in 5.2 and began R2 reply to R2's identification concern.
• Reproduced tertile robustness, Section 5.2 of `<OVERLEAF_ROOT>/<PROJECT_SUBDIR>/`
• Drafted opening of R2-Reviewer2 identification response
follow-ups: redo placebo with new bandwidth, email coauthor re panel data extension

Report: Logged to ProjectA page. 2 follow-ups detected — run /log-todo to file them as tasks.

Example 2 — ProjectB idea note (no follow-ups, single bullet).

Invocation:

diary: ProjectB — read Berger & Packard (2022) on linguistic similarity, thinking it could ground the cover-text similarity measure used in Section 3

Resolved project: ProjectB → personal_config.notion.project_pages["ProjectB"].

Appended entry:

**2026-05-11** evening — Reading note: Berger & Packard (2022) on linguistic similarity could ground the similarity measure in Section 3.

Report: Logged to ProjectB page.

Example 3 — Post-meeting summary.

Invocation:

session log: ProjectC — met with coauthor, agreed to switch from 16k to 32k SAE features. Need to retrain overnight and update the demo defaults to match new feature IDs.

Resolved project: ProjectC → personal_config.notion.project_pages["ProjectC"].

Appended entry:

**2026-05-11** afternoon — Coauthor meeting: agreed to switch from 16k → 32k SAE features.
• Retrain overnight
• Update demo defaults to match new feature IDs
follow-ups: retrain SAE 32k, update demo defaults

Report: Logged to ProjectC page. 2 follow-ups detected — run /log-todo to file them as tasks.

Failure modes

• Project not recognized. Tag doesn't match any row in the resolved project map and the surrounding text gives no hint. Stop, list the active projects from personal_config, ask the user which one. Do not pick a default.
• Notion MCP unavailable / page not shared with integration. If the append tool returns a permissions error, print the error verbatim, suggest checking that the integration has access to the Research subtree, and offer to write the entry to a local fallback file (~/.claude/skills/notion-log/unsent/<date>.md) so the work isn't lost. Do not silently swallow the error.
• Page locked or read-only. Same handling as above — surface the error, offer the local fallback.
• Notion API throttled / network down. Retry once after a few seconds. If still failing, fall back to local file and tell the user.
• Summary is empty (just `/notion-log ProjectA:` with nothing after). Don't append a content-free entry. Ask the user what they want logged.
• Ambiguous project across multiple pages. Default to the most-specific match, but mention the disambiguation in the chat report so the user can correct.

Out of scope

• No edits to historical entries. Appending only. If the user wants to fix a typo in yesterday's entry, they open Notion and do it manually — automated edits to existing blocks risk corrupting Notion's AI-meeting blocks and structured checklist history.
• No writes to the Notion Tasks DB. That's /log-todo's job. This skill mentions follow-ups in prose and suggests /log-todo; it does not create task rows itself.
• No writes to personal / non-research pages. Listed in "What to NEVER write to" above.
• No reads of Notion to build context before writing. This skill is intentionally write-only — it does not pull current page state, does not summarize prior entries, does not dedupe. Project pages are append-only by convention and reading first would be wasted work.
• No multi-project broadcasts. One invocation, one project. To log to two projects, run the skill twice.
• No editing of Notion's AI Meeting Notes blocks. Those are auto-generated; touching them breaks Notion's transcription feature.