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Use a work journal

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Re: Use a work journal

#91

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

pizzathyme wrote: post #53
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…

I’ve found a lot of success going one step further giving up on retrieval all together. I use either a new text file every time (which I never open again) or a physical notebook page (which I never refer back to). I get so much value from the act of writing itself.

Same. I just bought a scanner which I intend to use to scan and OCR my notes so that I can finally shred the mountain of paper I have. But I know I won't read the digital copy either so I'm not sure why I'm bothering. I guess it's the next step to putting it completely out of mind.

Re: Use a work journal

#93

Post by phito »

bityard wrote: post #8

I have been doing this for years. Every morning, I create a new Markdown file with the day's date, copy the previous day's content into it, and edit it. Mine has (for now) the following sections: Morning checklist, Todo, Done, and Meeting Notes. The morning checklist consists of things like checking email, checking Teams, skimming the team's handover queue, logging into various things, etc. Todo is a stack of things…

I have the exact same workflow! It's great!

Re: Use a work journal

#94

Post by DarkCrusader2 »

I have been using PlainTasks [0] plugin with Sublime Text for many years now at work to do something similar. It is sort of a mix between GTD [1] and journalling.

I create a new file monthly (since that is the "sprint" duration at work) and for each project I am working on, I create a project heading and a list of tasks below each. The plugin doesn't enforce any schema and is just a plain text file so I can iterate on the task list, record thoughts as free form notes anywhere (just below the project heading or below a particular task or just in the file anywhere.

If the notes grow too large for a particular project (they don't usually for me), I pull them in a separate file dedicated to that project.

I iterate on the task list as things become more clear. For eg. I might start as "Find out how to deploy new certificates on our cluster nodes". Once I have done some research or talked to my colleagues, I might mark this a done or delete it and replace it with a list of steps required to deploy the certificates.

I also mark things I am going to do today with "@today" every day in the morning. If something planned comes up urgently, it gets it own task with "@critical" tag. The plugin highlights these tags for me.

There are some more features but I only use creating and marking tasks as done with the 2 tags. The plugin is also semi-abandoned which is a big +1 for me as I don't have to worry about flow breaking changes or sudden sponsorship messages or constant updates.

I don't use sublime for anything else but tracking tasks and notes so it gives me a sort of dedicated workspace for collecting my tasks. Recall is just a plain text search away. I have been using this for many years and has been extremely effective for me. Whenever I feel lost of overwhelmed, I just look this file, find the @today tags and suddenly I am back in my flow.

Most of the other tools I have tried (Jira, Asana, Trello, Github/Gitlab issues, Azure DevOps, company internal project management tooling etc.) are too opinionated, not flexible enough, sends unnecessary notifications to me or everyone on the team and are a chore to maintain (busywork).

[0] https://github.com/aziz/PlainTasks [1] https://gettingthingsdone.com/what-is-gtd/

Re: Use a work journal

#95

Post by tivert »

> Except that it’s nothing new, right? “Writing helps you organize your thoughts more clearly”: everyone and their grandmother know that! Writing a plan, writing a diary? People keep listing how transformative that’s been for them.

Luckily, we'll soon be replacing writing with editing LLM output. Much more efficient. /s

Re: Use a work journal

#96

Post by hubraumhugo »

It's surprising how many devs are trying to overoptimize for productivity with various fancy tools and techniques, when it actually comes down to simple basics.

Here is what I rely on as a founder who does a lot of context switching:

- a never-ending text file for todos and work journal [0]

- calendar for planning (and blocking focus time)

- website blocker

- turned off notifications

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39432876

Re: Use a work journal

#97

Post by grugagag »

8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #90
galaxyLogic wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I write but never reread. The act of writing helps me organize my thoughts. Maybe I'll reread the last page when coming back to something but that's it. So my advice is to write when you have a lot on your mind so that you can get it out of your mind. That's it. Don't mess around with forums. That's for a different problem. Keep a pen and paper handy always. There can be no barrier to entry or it breaks the flow.

Likewise, I seldom reread. But I do get most out of just writing it down.

Re: Use a work journal

#98

Post by DarkCrusader2 »

hubraumhugo wrote: post #96

It's surprising how many devs are trying to overoptimize for productivity with various fancy tools and techniques, when it actually comes down to simple basics. Here is what I rely on as a founder who does a lot of context switching: - a never-ending text file for todos and work journal [0] - calendar for planning (and blocking focus time) - website blocker - turned off notifications [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/…

Big +1 to this (see my comment on this thread).

I just use a editor plugin to make marking tasks as done/cancelled easier and rotate the files every month to keep things a little organized (and scoping the keyword search) and it has been the most effective form of project management/journalling for me for many years.

Re: Use a work journal

#99

Post by uNople »

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…

> abandoning all notion of structure and organization ... optimizing fully for capture over retrieval, then relying on search tools and proximity

I did this too - obsidian's daily note feature is fantastic, and you can extract out pages from it if you want/need to dedicate a document for a specific thing. Since it's just markdown, search is quick - and being able to use regex if I need to is awesome. The graph view, showing connections between notes is great if you create notes on specific subjects, and link them together, or pull sections out to explain more in depth - but it's not really that necessary unless you're building your own knowledgebase, which like all documentation suffers from rot over time.

As long as your note-ing tool supports a good enough search that you can find things again, then I think it doesn't really matter what you use - as you said, writing it down is the important part.

Re: Use a work journal

#100

Post by Log_out_ »

I use notepad++ documents. One is the stack, its just describing as one liners with checkboxes and subtasks a task and its depths. Arrow to where execution is.one can have several threads of course.

Research into a topic goes into that list as tasks and then seperate documents or wikis if it blows the list.simple and it works suprisingly intuitiv like a bare metal os stack debug screen.

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