I have a #leftoff tag in all my Logseq journals where I leave a description of where I was when I stepped away from a task. Use it everyday all day. Simple and works great.
Use a work journal
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Re: Use a work journal
#62The technique of journaling as you work is sometimes called “interstitial journaling” and I became a big fan of it as a way to help focus as well as keeping track of what I was working on.
I made a tool to associate those notes with a color coded project and timestamp:
It ended up being unintentionally similar to an invoicing time tracking tool a freelancer might use but the use case Im interested in is more personal productivity.
Can’t say the project has generated much interest outside my own personal use but I find it very nice to track notes as I go and then easily see how much time I spent on a given project. You can also add a #hashtag in the notes and then filter by that hashtag in the calendar view.
Completely free in case anyone else finds it helpful!
Re: Use a work journal
#63The 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…
I write a lot of notes in fact I write more than I read. It helps. However I have some issues: 1. How much commentary should I write? I try to write not too many notes because I write code, and some say code should be self-documenting. So it's the same old question of how many comments should there be along the code. 2. How do I retrieve a note I've written earlier? I can use tags and search for them but it is not ea…
Keep trying. Try different methods. What works for me debugging and refactoring distributed systems may not work for you. The thing I tend to drive toward is a single page mind-map-like artifact that is monotonically increasing in density with a focus on system-of-record and data flow. I tend to keep notes about individual tech and important systems in whatever tools are handy, either locally or in a form that are accessible to the team. Often this takes the form of a JIRA page per topic, or an nvAlt note per topic. Tickets aren't great for this because they are ephemeral. These notes are where code snippets, error messages, anything searchable, go. I have something like the Zettlekasten[1] method in the back of my mind when deciding on scope of these support notes. However I may also start from a simple local text file, not committed to the repository, or even attached as a note to a ticket or other ephemeral trigger. But the thing that ties it all together, for me, is that mind map. Once I have that I can truly reason about the system.
Re: Use a work journal
#64I started doing a daily work journal in earnest when I began as a SWE and it's seriously saved my hide dozens of times. It's a habit that once you get used to, you can't function without it
Re: Use a work journal
#65Our implementation team of 15 writes individual and project logs every day.
The logs are not to account for a record of what was performed but rather the rational, decisions, setbacks, observations, learnings, etc of our work.
Each member of the team is expected to keep current on the individual and project logs.
I’ve been doing this now for the last two years and I’m always surprised at how helpful they continue to be.
Re: Use a work journal
#66The 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…
I write a lot of notes in fact I write more than I read. It helps. However I have some issues: 1. How much commentary should I write? I try to write not too many notes because I write code, and some say code should be self-documenting. So it's the same old question of how many comments should there be along the code. 2. How do I retrieve a note I've written earlier? I can use tags and search for them but it is not ea…
> 2. How do I retrieve a note I've written earlier? I can use tags and search for them but it is not easy to come up with a perfect tag which I would remember later.
Feed them all to an LLM?
Re: Use a work journal
#67The 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…
I write a lot of notes in fact I write more than I read. It helps. However I have some issues: 1. How much commentary should I write? I try to write not too many notes because I write code, and some say code should be self-documenting. So it's the same old question of how many comments should there be along the code. 2. How do I retrieve a note I've written earlier? I can use tags and search for them but it is not ea…
It really depends on your work. If you're doing mundane work, keeping notes is just busywork and doesn't really have a payoff.
But if you're constantly trying to solve novel problems, and have episodic ideas that are half-baked, writing notes -- without trying to organize them first -- can be really powerful. For me, I just write them in Logseq and tag them with a few hashtags like #topic1 #topic2 #topic3. It doesn't have to be a perfect tag, just tag it with all the topics you think are relevant.
From time to timeI click a hashtag and revisit all my half-baked ideas -- periodic revisits and curation is key -- I surprise myself when some peripherally connected notes coalesce into a real idea. (Logseq makes this easy because each note is bullet point that can be tagged, and clicking on a tag is like running a query)
This is called the Fieldstone method. (conceptualized by Gerard Weinberg). It's a very useful approach for writers because it recognizes that the best ideas are episodic and don't all come at once, you have to gather the "stones" over a long time before something gels.
https://www.amazon.com/Weinberg-Writing-Fieldstone-Gerald-M/...
I've used it with great success over the years (both at work and in my writing).
Re: Use a work journal
#68The 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…
Is the process of writing not for reading it but to solidfy memory? Of course the bonus is you could read it, but you really won’t
I sometimes write to document my thoughts - but just as often I write in order to discover what I think. Sometimes it's like the writing is the thinking.
Also, I love Obsidian. It became more useful when learned to stop overdoing it with exploring the endless plugin options, settled on a favorite few, and now mostly write in the daily note, occasionally extracting things to dedicated devnotes which in turn have chronological timestamped entries (and bidirectional links to the corresponding DNs). Highest possible recommendation to find a tool / workflow that suits you, and leverage it.
Re: Use a work journal
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes! Obsidian with daily note plugin and templates makes it really easy to build a quick list of things and automatically link to yesterday’s notes. A little extra time with templates and some custom js and you can make it a single key combo to copy the notes to paste buffer for sharing in slack standup thread. Also, set up a praise folder and take screenshots every time somebody says something nice about the work yo…
Do you all pay for obsidian? Subscriptions rub me the wrong way for whatever reason and it was enough that I didn't want to pay so I use something else.
If you're interested in an open-source, free equivalent, check out VSCodium (open-source version of VSCode), and FOAM (VSCode plugin - https://foambubble.github.io/foam/). In a new project, create a `docs/` folder, and start with `docs/notes.md`. When you want to branch out to other files & links, you can type [[MyTopic]] and FOAM will automatically create MyTopic.md, and will allow you to click on the link and navigate to it. Later, if you want to publish your notes as an HTML site, you can run `mkdocs` on the `docs/` folder, and it'll create a website from your notes. This MkDocs plugin enables the crosslinks in HTML: https://github.com/Jackiexiao/mkdocs-roamlinks-plugin. Good luck!
Re: Use a work journal
#70What 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…
It's the exact same thing as a messy desk pre computers. I'm a big subscriber of that idea.