Use a work journal • Hacker News Board

Re: Use a work journal

#41

Post by p5a0u9l » Sat, Jul 13, 2024, 2:40 AM UTC

nlawalker wrote: post #21

What finally got this to stick for me was abandoning all notion of structure and organization (and formal concepts like “logging” and “journaling”) and optimizing fully for capture over retrieval, then relying on search tools and proximity for the latter. I have the OneNote icon in the notification area configured to create a new quick note and use it liberally. Occasionally I look through all the pages, especially t…

This is the way. I’ve used zettelkasten, which is similar philosophy. Dump a thought and tag it for retrieval later. I prefer making this work with simple files and markdown. I have a colleague who uses email drafts well. My problem with OneNote and similar is the bloat of it. But, having images alongside text, when needed, is super nice.

Re: Use a work journal

#42

Post by charles_f » Sat, Jul 13, 2024, 2:43 AM UTC

vantassell wrote: post #29

charles_f wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Woops, thanks for letting me know, should be fixed in a few minutes. That's the one: https://fev.al/img/2024/focus.png

I'm getting the below instead of an image ![/img/2024/focus.png]

Yeah I'm editing that on a phone and apparently that's beyond my skillset. It's working now! Thanks for helping!

Re: Use a work journal

#43

Post by p5a0u9l » Sat, Jul 13, 2024, 2:44 AM UTC

Prose writing in any form is super useful. The challenge is having a unified tool to impose some structure. Instead, thoughts are divided across email, slack, confluence, quip, etc.

Re: Use a work journal

#44

Post by al_borland » Sat, Jul 13, 2024, 2:48 AM UTC

vantassell wrote: post #31

Reminds me a lot of Cal Newport's ideas re: Slow Productivity. He talks a lot about how Context shifts are death for knowledge work and that a lot of offices operate via a "hyper active hive mind" that doesn't allow or value deep work.

I have too many meetings to get anything done. I'll go weeks, or months, without actually doing anything of real value. Eventually it comes to a head and I need to get things done to avoid going crazy. I go on do-not-disturb in our chat app, quit Outlook completely, and turn on a focus mode on my cell phone so people can't even call me. I'll end up working for 8-15 hours straight with no real breaks. I go to the bathroom, but keep my head in the problem, that's about it. I completely forget to eat or do anything else. I get 2 months worth of work done in 1 day.

If meetings were eliminated (or just consolidated into a single planning week), and I cloud just do deep work, I think I could work 2 days per month and be more productive than I am currently working 40+ hours per week.

I always want to send my management graphs like this to show them why having 10 projects running at a time is a bad idea...

https://res.cloudinary.com/jlengstorf/image/upload/f_auto,q_...

...but I know it will be received poorly.

The image in the article (here, since the link was broken: https://fev.al/img/2024/focus.png) is something I've sent to a boss in the past. He didn't get it.

Re: Use a work journal

#45

Post by flakiness » Sat, Jul 13, 2024, 2:55 AM UTC

To me the hardest part of journaling (or Pomodoro, or whatever work-related methodology/hack) is to stick with it. I have a work journal. I abandoned it and came back, then abandoned it and came back again. It's an endless back-and-forth.

To those who keep doing this for a longer period: Any tips would be appreciated.

Re: Use a work journal

#46

Post by makz » Sat, Jul 13, 2024, 2:55 AM UTC

simpaticoder wrote: post #30

The benefit of journaling is not just reentry, but that you begin to solidify the mental model into a concrete branching of possibilities that is tightly coupled to the specific problem. Your work becomes traversal and mutation of this tree. Several benefits accrue: you begin to see gaps in the tree, and can fill them in. You begin to have confidence in your mental model, recovering the time you used to spend going o…

This advice is pure gold. Thank you.

Re: Use a work journal

#47

Post by geekodour » Sat, Jul 13, 2024, 2:59 AM UTC

simonw wrote: post #28

I use GitHub Issues threads for this and it works amazingly well. Any task I'm working on has a GitHub issue - in a public repo for my open source work, or a private repo for other tasks (including personal research). As I figure things out, I add comments. These might have copy pasted fragments of code, links to things I found useful, quoted chunks of text, screenshots or references to other issues. I often end up w…

I tried following this idea from simon (first via discord channels) about 8-9 months ago and now zulip, I used zulip "streams" as the "github issue" here. Worked very nicely for me.

I use it for everything and not only work journal, this creates a small problem.Since I dump both future references and worklogs, and I have ~50 channels, it's very easy to not get back to things and only get back to it when needed(which is the idea mentioned by OP). It seems like a feature than a bug at first but after capture, one round of review after some time interval really helps. It took a while but slowly seeing the benefits.

For that I plan to write some bot to re-organize the worklogs and the reference/other things dump to my own email at the end of the week and then I can create something like https://simonwillison.net/tags/weeknotes/ for myself(private) to go though at the end of the week. I think it would be perfect for me.

Re: Use a work journal

#48

Post by quest88 » Sat, Jul 13, 2024, 3:04 AM UTC

simpaticoder wrote: post #30

The benefit of journaling is not just reentry, but that you begin to solidify the mental model into a concrete branching of possibilities that is tightly coupled to the specific problem. Your work becomes traversal and mutation of this tree. Several benefits accrue: you begin to see gaps in the tree, and can fill them in. You begin to have confidence in your mental model, recovering the time you used to spend going o…

> Perhaps the greatest barrier to using it is akin to envy. We see others who apparently do this without written materials, in their head. I think we see this as evidence of intellectual superiority and harbor the doubt that using an aid like a journal means we are somehow lacking in skill or ability.

To add to your "this is wrong": These others may have themselves solved the problems we are now trying to solve, likely even using a journal. They no longer need a journal since they know how to navigate it, and it appears as superior to us.

Re: Use a work journal

#49

Post by charles_f » Sat, Jul 13, 2024, 3:04 AM UTC

flakiness wrote: post #45

To me the hardest part of journaling (or Pomodoro, or whatever work-related methodology/hack) is to stick with it. I have a work journal. I abandoned it and came back, then abandoned it and came back again. It's an endless back-and-forth. To those who keep doing this for a longer period: Any tips would be appreciated.

I had the same problem because it was serving no purpose.

What really worked for me is to make it a primary tool of work. Rather than sometimes writing what I did today, whenever I work on something somewhat involved, I immediately write my approach about it ("I need to do X so I started Y").

Re: Use a work journal

#50

Post by jen729w » Sat, Jul 13, 2024, 3:04 AM UTC

vantassell wrote: post #31

Reminds me a lot of Cal Newport's ideas re: Slow Productivity. He talks a lot about how Context shifts are death for knowledge work and that a lot of offices operate via a "hyper active hive mind" that doesn't allow or value deep work.

I find a timer useful for this. If you use Timery, you get a live activity on your home screen.

I don't care how long a thing takes, and I don't retrospectively analyse the time. The point is that I can only have one timer running: and that's the thing that I'm supposed to be doing.

If I notice I'm doing something else, it serves to bring me back to the task.

And at the end of the day, I do look through the list and see how often the thing I was doing changed. I try to keep that to a minimum, because every change is a context switch.

I've only been doing this for about a week, I'm still working on it, but so far it's been more helpful than not.