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The more senior your job title, the more you need to keep a journal (2017)

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Re: The more senior your job title, the more you need to keep a journal (2017)

#41

Post by OJFord »

joe8756438 wrote: post #12

Keeping a journal is important to anybody trying to realize something new. There are tons of senior positions that don’t require a lot of creativity. And there are tons of low level positions that do. Habit is the main journaling challenge, a fact barely touched in the article. There are two habits that need developing simultaneously: taking notes and reviewing notes. It’s true that simply writing something down lead…

Tatatap looks like a really nice straight-forward/utilitarian tool, thanks! As an aside, as someone interested in building similar (focused on solving one problem hopefully well) tools and earning some modest income from them, would you mind sharing (roughly) what your distribution of free/paid users looks like?

Re: The more senior your job title, the more you need to keep a journal (2017)

#42

Post by modzu »

prepend wrote: post #26
gorgoiler wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paper logs are critical for ideas. One just cannot be as expressive in markdown as one can be on a blank dotted-grid page and a pen-pot of Tombow double ended brush pens and Pilot V5s. Anything important can be digested into markdown, but with a note to the journal page where the magic actually happened. (It’s too bad that magic usually turns out to be gibberish thought spam.)

I like dotted grid as well. However I like Pilot Juice Up 03 gel tip .3mm. They are very precise, write in many conditions, and I’ve never had one run out of ink.

agree but zebra 401 here

Re: The more senior your job title, the more you need to keep a journal (2017)

#43

Post by munchbunny »

mister_hn wrote: post #4

Isn't it also because of ageing?

You mean losing memory over time? Not in my case. I switched from doing things in memory to keeping a notebook at the ripe old age of 24. For two reasons.

The first is that I simply couldn't hold everything in my head anymore because I had to track 5-10 different projects at any time, and context switching without something written down sucks when you have to context switch multiple times a day.

The second is that writing things down was a great way to force myself to clarify my thinking. I became more articulate across the board, not because I got better at bullshitting, but because I was now reserving time in advance to think through open issues in a structured way.

Re: The more senior your job title, the more you need to keep a journal (2017)

#44

Post by qntty »

elric wrote: post #6

I'm a software engineer, and I've been keeping a "lab journal" on and off for the past decade or so. A single markdown file per day, with the date as filename. First thing I do every day is copy the previous day's entry, give it a once over & remove what's no longer relevant. This helps me remember what I've been working on, and it's a track record of sorts. There's a todo list at the top of each day's entry. But the…

I do something like this too. I keep markdown files related to projects I'm working on. I never really made the connection between what I do and lab journals, although I'm familiar with the concept. This makes me think that I could be more organized with my own markdown files. I never thought to create a new one each day and copy the useful stuff from the day before, but that would probably help me be more organized. It can be overwhelming to sort through days worth of missteps just to figure out where you left off on a project.

Re: The more senior your job title, the more you need to keep a journal (2017)

#45

Post by shekhardesigner »

greymalik wrote: post #31
solarkraft wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many markdown based journal programs, some with encryption. Do these not work for you?

Can you suggest any in particular?

My personal choice for markdown notes is https://github.com/glushchenko/fsnotes

Re: The more senior your job title, the more you need to keep a journal (2017)

#46

Post by thomaslord »

modzu wrote: post #42
prepend wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like dotted grid as well. However I like Pilot Juice Up 03 gel tip .3mm. They are very precise, write in many conditions, and I’ve never had one run out of ink.

agree but zebra 401 here

I found that the Zebras, while certainly attractive and satisfying in the hand, write like crap (rough feel, inconsistent ink flow). My favorite pen these days is the Pilot V5 RT, but I wish I could throw the refill for it in a body more like the Zebra 401.

Re: The more senior your job title, the more you need to keep a journal (2017)

#47

Post by alexpotato »

tweetle_beetle wrote: post #30

I'm not expert in meetings, but increasingly I feel like the modern approach of "everyone invited to the meeting is there to say something" doesn't work. Someone who has nothing to directly contribute to the meeting needs to be present to keep the goal of the meeting in focus and ensure a single shared outcome at the end. Yes it's slower, sometimes less efficient and sometimes deep subject matter knowledge is importa…

This has the added benefit of:

- creating a short recap of what happened

- the above recap can also be shared with team members who couldn't attend (e.g. home sick or APAC based)

The latter has been incredibly useful during COVID specifically and for remote management in general.

Re: The more senior your job title, the more you need to keep a journal (2017)

#48

Post by jagraff »

ahmedbaracat wrote: post #24

I am considering getting a Remarkable tablet just to be able to have the best of both worlds: hand writing and searching. Has anyone used Remarkable extensively and want to share their experience?

I use the Remarkable. I love it for marking up documents and writing brief notes/sketches. Also (you may already know this if you've researched it) it exposes ssh and you can get root, so you can pretty much put any program you want on it. I've used https://github.com/canselcik/libremarkable to write some basic apps for it.

One thing I'll note is that the hand-writing -> text converter never really worked that well for me. I have messy handwriting so YMMV. I would still recommend it, but if that's the killer feature for you it's something to keep in mind

Re: The more senior your job title, the more you need to keep a journal (2017)

#49

Post by thomaslord »

ahmedbaracat wrote: post #24

I am considering getting a Remarkable tablet just to be able to have the best of both worlds: hand writing and searching. Has anyone used Remarkable extensively and want to share their experience?

I'm also curious to know if anyone has used the Remarkable in depth, especially with their second model coming out. From what I've read it seems like it has some limitations, but it seems like if it was a bit cheaper it'd be a great buy.

Re: The more senior your job title, the more you need to keep a journal (2017)

#50

Post by SamuelAdams »

Highly recommend reading the book "The Cuckoo's Egg" by Cliff Stoll. This book started as a journal by Cliff when he worked at Berkeley Labs in the late 80's. He was an astronomer-turned-IT, and in science I guess they are just in the habit of writing things down.

A few months and teletraces later his journal was thick enough to publish into a book, so he did exactly that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg

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