I blog monthly about the open source work that I do (see profile). I keep a draft blog post open and paste links into it as I go.

Do you mean timesheets (I do those for some stands of work) or writing-up (I maintain a 'blog' for a couple of other strands)?

I keep a google doc for the year and create a heading for each day where I write down a small sentence explaining each task along with the rough time (15 min increments or so) to be submitted by EOD and also track the time and write out detailed descriptions in our project management system (currently monday.com). Do not recommend. Minimum happiness levels will be quickly attained, and no one will ever look at all these notes more than once.

Basecamp has a check-in feature where you can send a question to be participating people on a regular basis.

I send “What did you work on today? what are you working on tomorrow?” Every day at 4:30pm.

Not as a proof that we’re earning our keep but to keep track on all the unplanned stuff and to keep our eyes on the planned items.

We have a Slack bot that sends out this kind of message for us as well. For my team it's 17.00 local time.

I also track everything I'd put into my update in Workflowy (and more, sometimes) throughout the day, so I end up with a bunch of daily logs to look back on if needed. I use it a lot, especially for our longer-form written "end-of-week" updates.

This is also useful when compiling a brag document for review time.

I use activitywatch: cross platform, free, locally hosted.

I use Todoist

https://todoist.com

I selfhost TimeTagger on hetzner with nginx basic auth in front. For backups i copy the timetagger sqlite file to a Hetzner storage box once a day. No issues so far, can recommend.