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

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

#71

Post by lukethomas » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 4:15 PM UTC

My journaling habit started with Ohlife.com way back in 2014. I found the idea of quickly recapping my week to be therapeutic., plus it was great to see entries over time.

I ended up building a product (https://www.friday.app/) to make this easy and automated. While it's built for teams to share updates and reflect (think weekly updates, retros, etc), there's "single-player" mode available too.

I like the digital journal format because I could never start the habit with paper. The automated reminders were critical to establish the habit. I still keep a regular notebook where I'll document thoughts, but it's more ephemeral.

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

#72

Post by stevekemp » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 4:17 PM UTC

chris_st wrote: post #23

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…

Absolutely. I did something slightly simpler: a single file with a per-day section. This helped immensely with quarterly reviews (I'd forget a lot of things I'd accomplished), and REALLY helped when I hit an obscure bug (typically a configuration thing) that I'd seen several months previously.

I'm glad to see I'm not alone! I also had ~/Work.MD stored for the past few years. Each day I add the date as a new top-level heading, and write notes of what I did.

I've recently started contracting (and billing hourly) so I've switched to using an org-mode file, which contains commands, links to internal stories, and other things.

As I'm contracting I figured I might be asked to justify the hours-billed, etc. So for the first time I'm explicitly writing the daily-log with the expectation that I'll share it, and the employer will see what I write.

That (perceived) level of scrutiny has really improved the detail and coverage of what I document.

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

#73

Post by Aperocky » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 4:25 PM UTC

Shameless plug: https://github.com/Aperocky/termlife/blob/master/diaryman.sh

This is how I get to keep journal, by having it as a 5 letter command in the terminal.

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

#74

Post by revicon » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 4:38 PM UTC

A while back I fell out of love with Evernote and migrated all my years of notes out to txt files which are synced to Dropbox. Huge nested folder structures but easily searched via grep or whatever. And then I have a folder called “Captains Log” and I make txt files for as many things as I can during the day. Code snippets, reminders to buy eggs at the store, urls to some dumb thing I want to remember to read later on but can’t bother with right now. Often the only content of the txt file is the title and no content if it was just a quick jot. And now you can use the Dropbox app edit txt files directly inside it which makes for easy note taking when mobile. Been using this method for years now, still going strong.

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

#75

Post by mister_hn » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 4:42 PM UTC

munchbunny wrote: post #43

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 wr…

But with age come more responsibility and stuff to take care of.

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

#76

Post by jhardy54 » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 4:43 PM UTC

war1025 wrote: post #69

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've been doing something very similar to this for the past year and a half. I was inspired by one of my coworkers who has a long running list of notes in a google doc. I run "vim `date -I`", which opens a file for the current day in the form `YYYY-MM-DD`. I keep it in a git repo that I commit and push to every time I add a note. I separate topics using `===` surrounded by blank lines. When I go back to update a topi…

Thanks for the tip! For anyone else who misread the `date` command and used a lowercase L, here's the command in monospace. It's an uppercase I.

    vim $(date -I)

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

#77

Post by joe8756438 » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 4:53 PM UTC

OJFord wrote: post #41

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?

Around 3%. There are people that use it a lot and the rest aren't that engaged.

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

#78

Post by asdff » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 4:56 PM UTC

paulcole wrote: post #58

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.)

> 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. Counterpoint: Yes they can. There’s this weird fetishization about paper notebooks. It’s like the people who say that vinyl is unequivocally better (it’s not). For some people the end result of digital notes is vastly superior to anything they can scribble in a notebo…

The difference is there is literature and research to support paper note taking as superior to digital in terms of comprehension and creative thought. If you've indexed your notebooks, it isn't hard to go back find relevant info years later.

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

#79

Post by asdff » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 4:59 PM UTC

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #52

SamuelAdams wrote: post #50

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…

When my dev team started at a company that was basically run by biochemists (we were all hired to start up a specific product), they gave us all really nice lab notebooks, I guess out of habit. Ten years later, I had used about 5 pages of mine. My two teammates wrote more, but none of us went past page 50 or so. OTOH, the scientists we worked with had gone through multiple books by that time. It's not an easy habit t…

Lab notebooks can be important for patent purposes. No surprise the chemists are meticulous.

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

#80

Post by elric » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 5:04 PM UTC

qntty wrote: post #44

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.…

I'm pretty disorganized by nature, so I need something to help me stay on track. The simple act of reading through that todo list first thing in the morning helps a lot. "Oh yeah, I finished that, that needs a bit more work, that's half way done". Depending on what it is I'm working on, it can be as simple as 5 bullet points, or it can be headings and paragraphs.

I try not to be strict about the format, and it's certainly evolved over the years.

For instance, we have a weekly department meeting. There's now a section "Dept Meeting" in today's file with a few points I want to bring up. Maybe they'll get resolved by then, or maybe I'll add more points. The simple act of copying that file each day and removing what's no longer relevant means I have refreshed my memory, don't have to worry about stuff that's no longer relevant, and have a track record of what I thought was relevant.