"Did I Take My Meds?" A Private Medication Log That Never Leaves Your Mac

It's 11 a.m., you're two emails into the morning, and the question surfaces out of nowhere: *did I take it today?* You picture yourself at the counter with the bottle — but that could be today, or yesterday, or any of the last two hundred mornings. They all look the same from here. This post is about why that question is so hard to answer, and about a deliberately small Mac app that answers it for you without sending your medication history anywhere.

Why "did I take it?" has no answer in your head

Taking a daily pill is close to the most forgettable thing you do. It's identical every day, it takes three seconds, and you usually do it while thinking about something else. Actions like that run on autopilot, and autopilot leaves almost nothing behind for memory to find later. There's no distinctive detail to tell this morning's version apart from yesterday's.

ADHD stacks two more things on top. Working memory is leaky, so the moment of taking it doesn't get held long enough to stick. And time blindness blurs *when*: even if you're fairly sure you took it "this morning," you may not be able to say whether that was 40 minutes ago or a day ago.

So the trouble isn't really forgetting to take it. It's that the record of having taken it was never written down anywhere you can read. Trying harder to remember doesn't fix that, because there's nothing there to remember. What fixes it is writing the record somewhere outside your head.

One tap, one answer: how Did I Take It? works

Did I Take It? is a Mac app that does one job: it shows you, for each medication you add, whether you logged it today. Each med gets a full-width card in one of a few colours you can read from across the room — green for taken, amber for *Not yet today*, blue when you've taken some of the day's doses, and red for *Overdue*.

Logging is a single tap on the card, or the I took it just now button. The card flips to *Taken at 8:02 AM* and shows how long ago that was, which takes care of the time-blindness half of the problem too. A new calendar day resets the question on its own.

• Scheduled or as-needed. Give a med a time and it turns red only after a 30-minute grace period. Leave the time blank and it never nags; it just waits for you to log it.
• Several doses a day. Set *Times per day* above one and each dose gets its own time and its own check, so the card reads "2 of 3 taken."
• Undo that doesn't erase the past. Tapped by mistake? Undo today takes back the most recent dose but keeps the timestamped entry, so your history stays honest.
• Recent history and a streak. A short daily history sits under each med, so "did I log yesterday?" is something you look up, not reconstruct.

Just as important is what it doesn't do. The app records your taps and nothing else. It doesn't know your prescription, it can't tell whether a dose was the right one, and it gives no dosing guidance. If you genuinely can't tell whether you took something and the log can't settle it, that question belongs with your prescriber or pharmacist, not with an app.

A medication log is health data. Ours stays on your Mac.

A list of what you take and exactly when you take it is some of the most personal information you have. We didn't want ours on someone else's server, so Did I Take It? doesn't have one. There's no account to create, no sign-up, no sync, and no analytics. The app makes no network requests at all, so there's nothing about your medication for it to send.

Your log is stored on your computer. In the direct-download version it's a plain JSON file in your Mac's Application Support folder; in the App Store version it lives in the app's own sandboxed container. Either way it's covered by your normal backups, like Time Machine, and it's gone if you delete the app. Nobody else, including us, holds a copy.

That's the same rule every Squirrel app follows. For the full version of what stays where and why, read why we build ADHD apps with no account.

Make logging part of the swallow

A log only helps if it's filled in at the moment it happens. These keep the habit small enough to stick:

1. Tap in the same motion as the dose. Pill in one hand, tap with the other. "I'll log it in a sec" is exactly the gap where the memory disappears.
2. When the doubt shows up, check before you guess. Glance at the card instead of searching your memory. That glance is what the app is for.
3. Leave it open where you already look. Keep it in the Dock or open beside your morning email, so "did I take it?" and "where do I check?" have the same answer.
4. Trust the record over the feeling. For the first week or two your gut will argue with the card. A filled-in history is what eventually lets it stop arguing.
5. If the log can't answer the question — say you took it and forgot to tap — don't fill the gap with a guess. Ask your pharmacist or prescriber.

If you're a student setting this up for the first time away from home, there's a version of this post written for you: managing your own meds at college. And if "did I eat?" and "am I thirsty?" feel just as invisible as "did I take it?", that's a related story: ADHD and interoception.

Squirrel apps are wellness tools, not medical devices, and don't diagnose or treat any condition.