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Use a work journal

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Re: Use a work journal

#261

Post by gofreddygo »

borghives wrote: post #80

Is there a benefit difference between digital journal and analog (pen) ? I’ve been having this internal debate. Any thoughts?

The digital camp tends to jump all over the place with a new solution to the same problem without ever getting it right or getting closer to the root of it. You will notice a whole lot of todo apps, organization articles and a new solution every couple years. None ever solve the fundamental problem - friction and focus.

The analog camp, solved this, each in their own unique way, but all using the same tools (pen and paper). Its much quiet here, as we all have moved on to real problems.

Re: Use a work journal

#262

Post by 3523582908 »

greggsy wrote: post #234
gofreddygo wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A real notebook and pen are the perfect tools for this. Its the only one I know that works, long term. append only log works, but skimming through 2 months of logs for a specific thing is poor and slow but very useful. I don't do that often but when i do need it sometimes and especially fast, like on a call, with no lead time. Its a superpower. I now organize my notebook a with a few conventions that make it more use…

What type of notebook?

I love me a daily planner, personally. I like having a page per day to organize my thoughts by hand.

Re: Use a work journal

#263

Post by _huayra_ »

The best tool for this I've found so far is Logseq [0]. The only things that come close in functionality are some really custom Emacs roll-your-own things that were just too hard for me as a basic Doom Emacs defaults user, and Anytype. However, I couldn't understand the storage of Anytype enough to convince me that my work would be okay with it (e.g. encryption, but IPFS-ing your files all over the place, maybe?).

Anyway, here are the reasons to consider Logseq for a "lab journal". Note all of these features are unique to Logseq (except the ones I note, afaik), but the subset of them are from what I can tell:

1. Local storage: this is just messing around with markdown on a local file. You can keep it in your corporate storage as a regular folder, at home, it is completely separate from your data sync setup and you can choose what you want. They are working a new database-backed version of the files for faster querying (though I have >10k files in it now and it does fine).

2. Open source: Obsidian, a popular alternative, is not open source. Considering this carries confidential info and all my personal stuff (not at work though!), I gotta trust my tools.

3. Killer feature that only Logseq has: custom, datalog query engine to query your existing notes and aggregate things. Other tools have some similar thing, but it's mostly akin to "search" and possibly ANDing some terms together, but Logseq has much more advanced uses enabled by this engine.

The datalog and querying feel initially like a "draw the rest of the owl" meme, as it is up to you to decide whether you want to create namespace hierarchies (e.g. should your `vim` page be `devtools/vim`, just `vim`, or tagged with `devtools`?), but once you figure out a system, it takes a bit to craft a few clever queries and reuse them with templates.

I have a reasonably slick system for this, where I have a set of queries prioritized by due date / priority on my home page, along with incoming (waiting for someone) and outgoing (someone waiting on me) dependencies. I organize things with a series of "project" pages that each have a very long query to aggregate all my daily journal entries (and other pages) that are tagged with anything related to that project page (e.g. I have a page `CMake Template Repository` where I'm trying to create a github template repo for C++ projects so I don't have to write it from scratch each time). It has really helped me get things done despite having a bit of ADHD. If there's enough interest, I can try to write this up in a blog post.

[0] https://logseq.com/

Re: Use a work journal

#264

Post by adiabatty »

simpaticoder wrote: post #203
dghlsakjg wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out obsidian. It is just folders and markdown so it is ultra portable, but the obsidian editor has tons of useful features like a graph view, autolinking, and a plugin in for anything you can think of. There are tons of YouTube videos and articles describing different organizing systems and ways to use it.

I like Obsidian, but plain text continues to reign supreme. I prefer nvAlt or my programmers editor, or if on a team, whatever the company provides (e.g. Jira). The embarrassment of options is actually a key problem in itself, since if you do not commit to one, you find your notes spread across various files, tools, and services, totally disjoint in a way that is impossible to work with and difficult to undo. The ide…

Obsidian vaults are just folders full of a bunch of Markdown files with a dotfolder that has some JSON configuration files in it. You can probably put images in them, too (I haven't needed to bother yet).

I'm not sure how you can get more plain-text than that.

Re: Use a work journal

#265

Post by simonw »

imiric wrote: post #194
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…

That's interesting, but aren't you concerned about using a proprietary service for this? I would hesitate to be at the mercy of a corporation for such a personal workflow.

GitHub Issues have a very comprehensive API. I've written code in the past to export all of my issues and their comments: https://datasette.io/tools/github-to-sqlite

Re: Use a work journal

#266

Post by simonw »

compootr wrote: post #243
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…

my concern is what happens when github decides they don't want you on their platform any more, and terminate your account immediately?

I do worry about that. I've been meaning to setup an automated export of my issues to protect against that situation.

My protection for now is nepotism: I know enough people at GitHub that I'm confident I could use back channels to recover my account if I ever need to.

Re: Use a work journal

#267

Post by gsinclair »

lelanthran wrote: post #112
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…

> 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.

Love it. Just two questions from curiosity.

One. In your experience of using it for a while now, what is a typical tree size? What’s the highest it’s ever been?

Two. Why did you write it in C? Several other languages would surely make it much easier to implement that program. Not a critique at all, just curious. (I’m actually glad you wrote it in C. It’s a nice, reasonably sized piece of code to peruse.)

Re: Use a work journal

#268

Post by lelanthran »

gsinclair wrote: post #267
lelanthran wrote: post #112

Earlier 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.

Love it. Just two questions from curiosity. One. In your experience of using it for a while now, what is a typical tree size? What’s the highest it’s ever been? Two. Why did you write it in C? Several other languages would surely make it much easier to implement that program. Not a critique at all, just curious. (I’m actually glad you wrote it in C. It’s a nice, reasonably sized piece of code to peruse.)

> One. In your experience of using it for a while now, what is a typical tree size? What’s the highest it’s ever been?

For me, the deepest node has ~ 25 ancestors. I don't know the largest depth it has ever been.

> Two. Why did you write it in C? Several other languages would surely make it much easier to implement that program.

I'm competent enough in C that it didn't matter to me, and the important thing was being able to call the library from any other language. Easy FFI made it quick to make a GUI for it (I primarily use the GUI now).

The library is in C, so others can make GUIs and wrappers in whatever language they want to, which is something I would like to encourage.

Re: Use a work journal

#269

Post by torblerone »

codazoda wrote: post #81
senkora wrote: post #13

I keep a stack. Whenever I am interrupted, I push a task onto the stack. When I finish a task, I pop it from the stack. Each task has an associated journal file. Sometimes I reorder the stack.

I recently started doing this with my todo list. I wrote a few bash functions and aliases: todo: Open my list in an editor todo [thing]: Add a thing to the bottom of my list. next: Show me only my next most important task. mark: Mark my current task done. There are a few more, but you get the idea.

Do you have them publicly available somewhere? I'd be interested in that, especially your `next` function telling you which to-do is coming up next without you having to look at _all_ tasks again.

Re: Use a work journal

#270

Post by jcul »

8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #91
pizzathyme wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Same here too. It's the act of writing that's important to me.

Keeps my thoughts in order while I'm switching tasks etc.

I do use a rocketbook which is a little reusable notebook with a companion app you can use to quickly scan and upload the pages.

I only scan the things I think I might refer back to, but it is seldom I actually do refer back.

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