The first paragraph spoke to me. The complexity of the systems is so big and the difficulty of fixing issues is exponential.
The stress of working on things that are not core software development is killing me. How to calm down after working on days without good progress on the issue, PM is on my neck, the end of sprint is near and the task is not finished yet.
Use a work journal
211–220 of 305 posts
Re: Use a work journal
#212What 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 took me a couple years to realize this too. For the past five years I abandoned all structure. I use a literal log file. Chronological from top to bottom, with paragraph breaks for each workday. Higher than necessary verbosity, no points taken away for spelling or grammar mistakes.
I've also been doing this for ~30 years. My current job's journal is 17,581 lines long. It's just a file I edit in screen (so I can attach to it from multiple machines) with a line with the date on it and then a sentence for every thing I've done that day.
It is super helpful when we notice something strange has been going on since a specific date. I give my coworkers access to it and we will regularly refer back to it to try to figure out what was going on on a particular date. I also use it monthly to summarize for my 1:1 meeting with my boss.
I also have a Kindle Scribe e-notebook that I use for my daily todo list. The writing experience with the Kindle is very good, in that it's very paper like, but the access and retrieval is pretty meh. I described it to my coworkers as: It's exactly like paper, only more expensive. I'm basically doing bullet journaling of my tasks, things I need to circle back with coworkers about, and stuff to chat about over lunch or shows people have recommended.
Re: Use a work journal
#213To 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.
Gustave Flaubert said, "be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work." Perhaps we who strive to be regular and orderly in our work should accept a little chaos in our life.
On the other hand, perhaps we simply need better external anchors for our habits. I have been journaling on-and-off for years. Environments change, people change, and my schedule changes. What got me back into it this time was joining a Shut Up and Write™ meetup. That broke the seal, and I've been sporadically journaling to de-frag in the weeks since.
Re: Use a work journal
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use different editors for different purposes, e.g., Obsidian for long form and planning, OneNote for meetings. I wouldn't overthink it, though, and just use the simplest tools available. I use Sublime Text 3 with a few shortcuts to add the current timestamp, etc. and log everything in a long file. I was too ambitious in the past and wanted to learn how to use Emacs for everything, but it just held me back, and I en…
do you have a decent system to get entries between(both in and out) Obsidian and OneNote? I have a similar system to you, but getting things in and out of OneNote is such a massive pain. Everything I have tried requires significant reformatting (even Word).
I usually don't move notes to and from OneNote. I tried this Obsydian importer, and it is OK for my meeting notes in terms of formatting. However, it has a bug that strips slashes from page titles, which is a bit of an issue for me because I always add dates to titles (e.g., 7/13/2024).
With a few good examples, maybe some LLM could help you with reformatting?
Good luck!
Re: Use a work journal
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
It took me a few times to land on something I stuck with. At my current job I have a running doc where I just start a new entry per day, at the top and log before I try to do something, and what progress I made that day. What maybe helps is this doc is findable and readable by coworkers and my boss. It is very useful for me, but it's also helpful for others to see what I'm working on without pinging me.
I do kind of the same but I’d be concerned to have it readable and n not private. But maybe I shouldn’t be. What’s your thoughts on having it open? I think it would be the first in the company if it’d do that.
Eh, I just try to not slack off too much. I've been doing this for nearly 2 years and so far only benefits as far as I can tell. I think very few people look at it besides myself and occasionally my boss.
Re: Use a work journal
#216The 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…
> 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. I wrote a program (used from a CLI, but I mostly use the GUI I developed for it) to do something similar for my own use: https://github.com/lelanthran/frame/blob/master/docs/FrameIn... I use it daily.
This is really cool. How do you reorder frames?
If you’re working on a particularly complex frame, how do you maintain context?
Re: Use a work journal
#217What 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 what I do too.
I use the Obsidian TimeStamper plugin with a nice shortcut (Ctrl + .), and then just have an append-only log of thoughts that each start with a timestamp on its own line. I'll throw in a tag or two if I'm motivated (#tickets/DEV-1234) and create a new file every month (e.g. 2024-07).
It makes it very easy and fast to just switch to Obsidian and do a brain dump before lunch / end of day, or any time a thought hits me.
Re: Use a work journal
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. I wrote a program (used from a CLI, but I mostly use the GUI I developed for it) to do something similar for my own use: https://github.com/lelanthran/frame/blob/master/docs/FrameIn... I use it daily.
Not a comment about the project itself. If someone wants to try a similar flow but cannot run the above for any reason, git can be used to achieve something similar. You can also make use of existing tooling around git for shell integration like PS1 and gui. 1. Your main/master branch is your root frame. 2. Child Branches + branch commits themselves are messages. 3. Pop is hard reset of branch to parent or branch swi…
But how do you use that flow to _plan_ your work?
Re: Use a work journal
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. I wrote a program (used from a CLI, but I mostly use the GUI I developed for it) to do something similar for my own use: https://github.com/lelanthran/frame/blob/master/docs/FrameIn... I use it daily.
It's low-tech, but I've been using notebooks (not too thick, stapled usually). I write a header for each day when I start and then a line or two as I work on tasks and I try to note each time I switch tasks. I keep the notebooks but rarely look at them once they are filled. Maybe once or twice as I switch to a new notebook and then once again when it comes to yearly review time. A couple of times I have rifled throug…
Van Neistat (YouTube) has a video that I can’t find know where he talks about his planning process. He uses full sized poster boards.
Lots of space to lay out your ideas and get a great overview just not very pocketable.
Re: Use a work journal
#220To 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.
Every day starts with a new day note that automatically generates a checklist for me.
One of the checklist items may be to journal.
The randomness is so that I actually follow through on the checklist and don’t gloss over it.