# What is Work Journal?

Also called activity log, agent journal.

A work journal is a chronological record of what an agent did, when, on whose instruction, and with what result. It is written for human reading rather than for machine parsing, and it is the primary artifact used to answer questions about past agent activity. It is distinct from a technical execution log.

The difference from system logs is one of audience and granularity. An execution log records every call and response in machine readable form and is useful for debugging. A journal records the unit of work a person would recognize: a report drafted, a message sent, a record updated, with a link to the artifact produced and a note on what was skipped.

Journals serve three purposes. Accountability, because someone must be able to reconstruct what happened without reading raw traces. Handover, because a person taking over a process needs the recent history in a readable form. And review, because quality sampling requires a population of completed work items to draw from.

The information that turns out to matter is consistently the same. What triggered the work, what inputs were used, what was produced, what was not done and why, and whether a person intervened. The last two are the fields most often omitted and the ones most often needed, since the interesting question is usually about a case that did not go as expected.

Retention and access deserve a deliberate decision. Journals accumulate a detailed picture of activity, and where that activity touches customer records the entries inherit the same handling obligations as the underlying data. A stated retention period and a defined access boundary should be part of setting one up, not something addressed after a request for the records arrives.

## Key points

- Human readable chronological record of completed agent work
- Distinct from machine readable execution logs
- Supports accountability, handover, and quality review
- Must record what was skipped and why
- Needs a stated retention period and access boundary

## In practice

A journal entry reads: triggered by the Monday schedule; pulled twenty three new signups from the CRM; drafted personalized welcome messages for twenty one; skipped two because the company field was empty and flagged them for review; drafts saved to the outbox for approval; approved and sent by the founder at 09:14 with edits to three. The linked drafts remain readable from the entry.

## Related terms

- [Agent KPI](/en/glossary/agent-kpi)
- [Quality Assurance Review](/en/glossary/quality-assurance-review)
- [Escalation Path](/en/glossary/escalation-path)
- [Task Delegation](/en/glossary/task-delegation)
- [AI Workforce](/en/glossary/ai-workforce)

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