Ask HN: How do you manage your day to day work logs?

I tend to take a more task-oriented approach. If there is something important that is related to product, that will go in JIRA and scheduled/assigned appropriately. If I need to do something in the future that nobody else really cares about, including what I want to work on tomorrow, I'll just use slack [0] to remind me. Other than that I don't really bother with notes. I've tried in the past but things change so quickly I've never had value in reviewing notes, other than to get the action items. Notable exceptions made for board meetings and other official business.

I've also been using DropBox Paper [1] a bit recently. They have a really cool meeting template so if someone is taking notes they can easily invite the team from Google Calendar and assign simple followup tasks from there using @mentions in a checklist.

[0]: https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/208423427-Set-a-rem... [1]: https://www.dropbox.com/help/paper/smart-meeting-notes

Paper and pen (of two colors).

Draw a circle with text to the right, bottom, etc, connect to other items and sketches with arrows. In top left corner there is a type-box with "task|iss|pm|adm" text or combination of these — that quickly describes contents of the page. In progress, Completed, Rejected items are marked with ..., V, X. Once all is completed/rejected, big (V) mark near type-box is drawn, (W) for "even tested". If related group is completed, draw bounding shape and big (V) in it. Use colors for better visual cues.

Draw shortened operative plan (with ...) on separate temporary page. Dispose it once complete.

Put all papers into "punched pocket"[1] in you-see-latest order.

I tried many tools and formats, but these are either unflexible or slow to create, this tradeoff was never beaten. At first glance, one may note that there is no search or redraw capabilities, but these are not really necessary, if you follow simple rules.

Never reuse page for something completely unrelated or temporary. Use only one side of paper. Disallow your colleagues to draw anything on it, always have blank pages for them. Redraw papers that were wasted like above. Every [edit]discussed task should have a circle and text. Once punched pocket is full, archive bottom half of it into hard folder.

Listing these pages makes me instantly remember the entire situation/discussion. It never happens with post-created electronic records.

  [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_pocket

I use a variation of the Bullet Journal, but I use MSFT One Note to manage it.

I think the big thing, no matter what you do, is to establish a routine of reviewing it for a few minutes daily. No matter where you're capturing ideas, todos, status etc, I believe you need to have dedicated mental processing time to maintain the list, keep it clean, organize priority, etc. Even if you can't do it daily (you may not need to), try to aim for once/week to review and iterate....

(I'm trying to give you more of a philisophy for managing it than a technology, because no matter which tech you go with, without an established process, you'll fail.)

I just keep a simple flat text file. I have a command that opens that file and positions the cursor at the end. I have a simple editor command that adds a new timestamp when I start a new day. There is really no other structure (well, notes that say 'TODO' with checkboxes like [] for "not done" and [x] for "done", but that's really it).

The file is many megabytes long, and that's useful because it's incredibly easy to search.

I've tried other approaches, other tooling, and really it just came down to realizing that there was tremendous value in keeping a log, and that to be successful I had to keep it dirt simple rather than switching horses to new shiny every few months.

I'm a big fan of OneNote. I use it on my Mac, iPhone, Windows machine, and Android phone to keep a bunch of stuff in sync.

I have one section that contains a Note for each week. I archive the notes after awhile. Each week I start a new Note for that week, and update it daily. At the top, I keep my task list of things to do. When I go to copy it to the next week's note, I rank what's important and not.

I have a section called "projects" where I create a note for each Major project I'm working on. Here's where I create a Dashboard for what's going on with that project.

I have a section called "company" where I create notes related to my big companies process/procedures.

I have a section called "releases" where I have all the release notes stored of all the features that have gone into the project: this is so I can find almost anything instantly with the search functionality. I also have a note called Current Release, that I use as a scratch pad for the current things going on.

In general, any important email that I need to save from Corp, I transpose into my OneNote notebook. I also link a lot of my TODOs that I need to have deadlines on into Tasks in Outlook (I don't do this on my Mac.)

Anyway, I"ve used a lot of tools, like Org-mode, Evernote, Reophnotes, nValt, etc....and have been happy with the tool called One Note.

Etc....