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…
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 use something like this too, I will say it's helpful to have some simple command to append text to it so you can do it automatically, and then an extra little bit so if it's your first append of the day it adds the date. Sometimes I know something happened on a date and if you're just using paragraph breaks to separate it's harder to find but if you know it was related to this meeting on that date a few months ago you can go straight to it.