It comes up every so often on HN "how to keep a journal" or "use this Vim alias to keep work notes". I'm curious, for those who keep a work log, do you review your notes? Or do you use them to optimize your working habits? And if so, how do you do this?
Ask HN: Do you keep work logs, and if so, how do you use them?
1–10 of 29 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do you keep work logs, and if so, how do you use them?
#2I do loosely keep a log. I use a sublime plugin called plain notes (or simple notes? I don't know).
I used to think it's a great idea to log everything, but now I've resorted to trying to only add to the logs whenever I think I can benefit from the knowledge later.
It has definitely been very useful, I now have tons of notes on useful regexes I can use to search for very specific code patterns, tons of details about sql-injection preventions, optimizations, language features, etc...
I love the idea of working on a base of knowledge that gets sturdier and more reliable as more time goes on. It is a materialized kind of growth.
Re: Ask HN: Do you keep work logs, and if so, how do you use them?
#3Daily summary of things I did the day before in morning. Both work and personal.
So I can see what I did 3 weeks ago and gauge my progress over time, and critic myself effectively
Also throughout day I try and capture important details / thought processes as they happen (I try to do this every few hours)
Re: Ask HN: Do you keep work logs, and if so, how do you use them?
#4I keep logs on individual tickets I work on and separately also a daily wrap-up.
Re: Ask HN: Do you keep work logs, and if so, how do you use them?
#5I haven't needed my notes that often but on occasion I do and that's usually when I'm glad I took the time to keep a engineering journal.
I accomplish this with a jupyter-notebook inside a git version controlled repository. I'll usually write my notes down in markdown format. Markdown is nice for me because it forces me to write clean/formatted/organized notes versus just writing random stuff down in a word doc. Jupyter-notebooks work great for me because much of my scripting is done with python. So I can include snippets of python code if I want as well as share it with my friends/colleagues.
Our company has an internal server that hosts the atlassian tools such as confluence/bitbucket/jira/cruciable. Each of us in the software department have our own company bitbucket account. Therefore, I keep my jupyter-notebook hosted on my bitbucket account.
For personal use I have moved away from paper/pencil journals. I usually collect my notes in the same way or sometimes just in a text file that I organized in their own dedicated git repositories on my GitLab account. Usually it's a project per project basis. For example, I version control many things in my home directory on my Linux computer like my bashrc/bash_profile/vimrc/zshrc and files alike. This gets consolidated in a "My_Linux_Setup" with other notes of mine of what packages and libraries I need to install should I need to reimage my computer.
Re: Ask HN: Do you keep work logs, and if so, how do you use them?
#6Written notes, but it's mostly write-only or for very short-term things. I still keep all my notes and from time to time open them just to relive great memories.
Re: Ask HN: Do you keep work logs, and if so, how do you use them?
#7I keep useful notes in one note. I don't log time anymore. Hallelujah! Was logging time from 2012-18 in various jobs and boy it sucks. The code quality reflects the clock watching too.
Re: Ask HN: Do you keep work logs, and if so, how do you use them?
#8I haven't needed my notes that often but on occasion I do and that's usually when I'm glad I took the time to keep a engineering journal. I accomplish this with a jupyter-notebook inside a git version controlled repository. I'll usually write my notes down in markdown format. Markdown is nice for me because it forces me to write clean/formatted/organized notes versus just writing random stuff down in a word doc. Jupy…
How often do you review these notes? And do you use any tools besides grep to search through them?
Re: Ask HN: Do you keep work logs, and if so, how do you use them?
#9Some people really like emacs org-mode for this purpose.
Re: Ask HN: Do you keep work logs, and if so, how do you use them?
#10I work in aerospace where the computer systems are heavily locked down and I can't just install org-mode.
So I began keeping a bullet journal for productivity reasons. However I discovered it makes a great work log if you actually use it. I can flip back and find notes on exactly what I was doing on any given day.