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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)

#91

Post by claytonjy »

jagraff wrote: post #48
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 f…

I'll second this; I love mine, but have written off OCR and searchability completely.

I bought it to be an e-reader, but ended up taking a ton of notes in it. I have notebooks for projects, for recurring meetings, a single-page "task list" and a page-per-week notebook tracking what I plan to do, what I did, and what I learned, which I use to inform my part of weekly standup meetings.

I prefer to keep most notes ephemeral; if it matters, I should be transcribing it elsewhere (preferably to something typed; I have some shame about my handwriting quality). I do keep all past weeks of my standup notes, and I expect to draw on them heavily to inform performance reviews and promotions, but I can go through them in order, so even there searchability is not a big loss.

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

#92

Post by kevstev »

linker3000 wrote: post #60
GlennS wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For this reason I try to write everything down twice. Once roughly by hand, and then a day or two later tidied up and put on the computer.

I was taught some 30 years ago that best practise is to write clear contemporary notes because transcribing them later can lead to self-censorship, deciding to omit what might seem irrelevant at the (new) time, but subsequently becomes important, or incorrect re-interpretation.

I am not sure I follow this line of thinking? You are saying that after the fact you somehow understand the context less than you did at the time of initial writing?

I find the absolute opposite to be true- At the time of the lecture or meeting or whatever, I am just trying to capture everything. What is truly important and what is noise is not clear to me at that point. Also in the beginning stages of a class or project certain concepts or decisions seem very new or foreign, and a few months later they are deeply ingrained and no more likely to be forgotten than understanding what gravity is.

By far the most successful study technique I have ever used is recopying my initial notes. The second set is much more coherent, organized, and focused on the tricky bits while removing things that I thought might be important at the time but ended up not being important.

I think someone did you a major disservice 30 years ago.

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

#93

Post by blackrock »

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…

Try this alias.

  alias jim=' \
    journaldir="/home/myusername/journal/" ; \
    jfile="log_`date -I`.txt" ;       \
    jfilepath="$journaldir$jfile" ;   \
    echo "Creating log: $jfilepath" ; \ 
    vi $jfilepath ; '
Instructions:

(1) Copy to your .bash_aliases file.

(2) Edit the journaldir, and replace myusername with your name.

(3) Create a journal directory somewhere for #2.

(4) Source it. source ~/.bash_aliases

(5) jim will open up today's note in Vi.

Try it out, and let me know.

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

#94

Post by fastasucan »

I just want to recommend https://jrnl.sh/ which is a neat little terminal tool for keeping journals. I am sure most here could built it them-self over the weekend, but why reinvent the wheel. It works great with tags, dates (both displaying journal entries from date or date ranges and making an entry for a date or a time "yesterday"). It also support encryption and has a wide range of export options.

Funnily enough I actually love notebooks, but I cannot for the death of me keep a neat and nice design when keeping notes using a physical notebook, which means that I loose all motivation. However, having a minimalist tool like jrnl helps me to actually write, not just collect blank notebooks.

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

#96

Post by ironchef »

et1337 wrote: post #54
ironchef wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do the same-ish thing. Main highlights on mine: 1) I start off the day with things I should be working on (samesies) 2) I use ### to demarcate different "working sessions" ... one for each meeting, etc. 3) I struggle with finding something that lets me: encrypt, search, big notes, and use multi platform easily :( Closest I've found was google keep so far .. but i hate relying on it like that. I'm pretty sure "somet…

Standard Notes is my Google Keep replacement. Fully encrypted, straightforward business model, works great, apps available on iOS and Android.

Thanks. That was next on my list :)

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

#97

Post by ironchef »

solarkraft wrote: post #14
ironchef wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do the same-ish thing. Main highlights on mine: 1) I start off the day with things I should be working on (samesies) 2) I use ### to demarcate different "working sessions" ... one for each meeting, etc. 3) I struggle with finding something that lets me: encrypt, search, big notes, and use multi platform easily :( Closest I've found was google keep so far .. but i hate relying on it like that. I'm pretty sure "somet…

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

My bits were on MacOS, Linux, Win, iOS, and required usage w/o internet (so I could work on airplanes, etc.).. so _something_ was always missing (between those + encrypted + searching).

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

#98

Post by solarkraft »

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?

I don't have much experiences with them (flat text files aren't my style), but a friend seems happy with Joplin.

A HN search illustrates the amount of markdown note apps available: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

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

#99

Post by redisman »

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…

We use that and then post it in slack at the end of day as a kind of async status/standup update.

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

#100

Post by tehjoker »

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 the same, but using paper notebooks. I was able to accurately fill out a financial report because of the notes I took over a year ago on a large processing job. It's very helpful to do and organizes my thoughts. Using paper also lets you draw when needed and sketch out how an algorithm should work.
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