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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)

#121

Post by Yhippa »

prepend wrote: post #15

I still use paper as I find the act of writing down is more useful than search. About once a year I dig into my stack of pocket paper moleskine notebooks to look something up. I make entries for each meeting, date, participant, notes, incoming and outgoing tasks. Also adding in sketches, designs, and other stuff that I wanted to write when I didn’t have a computer near. I started this because I found having a laptop…

I love this quote from the article:

> The novelist Paul Theroux has said that he writes long-hand because, “The speed with which I write with a pen seems to be the speed with which my imagination finds the best… words.”

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

#122

Post by julianlam »

commandlinefan wrote: post #32
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…

As I started to get more experienced (also software development) I noticed that more and more people were seeking out my help - which was frustrating, because I had goals I was supposed to be working toward myself. I found that keeping a log of each interruption and how long I spent on it eased my anxiety quite a bit: although I've never actually been asked to justify why it took "so long" to complete a task, having…

That's quite interesting, turning the work tracking on its head and tracking interruptions instead.

Some days I wonder where the day goes, with interruptions and getting back in the zone, it's a miracle anything gets done.

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

#123

Post by stevekemp »

mpfundstein wrote: post #85
stevekemp wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fo…

only share if you have to. and better negotiate on outcomes instead of hours. just a tip :-) took me a while to understand why

I'd mostly share the specific details of what I'd done with my peers, rather than the "higher up" who hired me. It's like documentation, or knowledge-sharing, which is an important part of team-work.

But good comment, thank you!

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

#124

Post by ulisesrmzroche »

I got a 5 dollar Wordpress droplet on digital ocean for my work journal. I also use it to keep up with Wordpress, even tho I don’t actually extend it

The most feature thing for me is I can use my tablet. Dealbreaker otherwise. I’ve been looking at Notion but their iPad app was trash last time I used it

Besides don’t hunch and don’t get fat, “keep a journal” is what I would tell my younger self

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

#125

Post by blackrock »

blackrock wrote: post #93
war1025 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

Or, here's an even better alias.

  alias jim=' \
    journaldir="$HOME/journal" ;   \
    year="`date +%Y`" ;            \
    yearpath="$journaldir/$year" ; \
    [[ -d "$yearpath" ]] || mkdir -p $yearpath ; \
    jfile="log_`date -I`.md" ;                \
    jfilepath="$journaldir/$year/$jfile" ;    \
    header="# log_`date -I`\n\n# Highlights:\n\n" ; \
    [[ -f "$jfilepath" ]] && echo "Opening log: $jfilepath" || { echo "Creating new log: $jfilepath" ; echo -e "$header" >  $jfilepath ; } ; \
    vi $jfilepath ; '
Copy this to your .bash_aliases file. It's fully automatic. It'll create the directories automatically.

This will now create a /home/user/journal/YEAR/journalfile.md. It's now separated by year, so that you can run this forever, and have a maximum of 365 files per year directory.

This is a markdown file. And in the header variable, I had it fill in the new file with some basic headers. You can edit this yourself to add more.

Try it out, and let me know.

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

#126

Post by blackrock »

mabil wrote: post #104
blackrock wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

I have something similar, with the folder syncing to google drive, you could encrypt if you want to before hand but I never got to it, I separate one file per month. alias journal="vim ~/workspace/google-drive/journal/$(date "+%Y-%m")" Then in vim I have this mapping, by pressing F2 it opens a new line at the end of the file so you can just start typing. I add goals to the beggining of the week with the F3 map. nnore…

Neat. I'll try this out. I had never remapped a key in Vi before.

Check out my other alias, in the sibling comment. I improved on it.

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

#127

Post by ytjohn »

ironchef wrote: post #9
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-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…

I've done similar. I used to use Quiver[1] for years. It's MacOS only. Then in October, I was forced onto a Windows machine for work. I tried Joplin as it was the closest in features, and it has built in encryption.

What I eventually ended up doing was moving to vscode. I use it my main IDE for the last couple years. I have a linux vm running for all my development, with vscode remote ssh.

- I keep a folder for each month - I have a file in each month called YYYYMM-dailies.md, level 2 headings for each day - Notes that grow too complex for the "dailies" get their own file in the folder. A number of these might get polished and copied into a document site somewhere. - Sometimes I'll make a subdirectory of "snips" with small scripts or pseudo-scripts (stuff to copy/paste) - The integrated shell lets me paste commands into my dev vm and copy the results back into my notes.

A feature of this is that while it's not really "synchronized", I can vscode-remote-ssh from multiple machines, or just ssh into the vm to get my notes. You can use rclone or keybase+rsync to backup the notes directory (or keybase's git if you want to check notes in).

Another

[1]: https://happenapps.com/

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

#128

Post by prepend »

nitrogen wrote: post #118
paulcole wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Do you have a good system for drawing diagrams and plotting graphs in Markdown? Maybe some hybrid of dot, octave, and latex?

I use mermaid.js for graphs and charts in markdown. It takes a long time, related to pen and paper, so I don’t use it for note taking. But it’s really nice for procedural documentation.

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

#129

Post by epakai »

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.

If you like fine points Uniball's Signo RT1 write very well with 0.28mm tips. Ink capacity is not their strong point though. Pretty sure I was going through several a semester.
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