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The more senior your job title, the more you need to keep a journal (2017)

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Re: The more senior your job title, the more you need to keep a journal (2017)

#111

Post by Thorentis »

tweetle_beetle wrote: post #30

I'm not expert in meetings, but increasingly I feel like the modern approach of "everyone invited to the meeting is there to say something" doesn't work. Someone who has nothing to directly contribute to the meeting needs to be present to keep the goal of the meeting in focus and ensure a single shared outcome at the end. Yes it's slower, sometimes less efficient and sometimes deep subject matter knowledge is importa…

This is why secretaries were so great. I remember a thread a few months ago here talking about it, and how most senior professionals had a secretary decades ago. Now, people are expected to type their own notes, make their own meetings, AND produce the same amount of work. Half the time I see people talking about "productivity tips" I laugh imagining what engineers decades ago would think of it. Other than a lab notebook, why do you care about what format you take your meeting notes in? That's the secretaries' job!

Seriously, a good secretary, even one shared amongst a team, could be a huge time saver. Meeting minutes, meeting invites, catering, visitors, errands. Why did this role disappear?

Re: The more senior your job title, the more you need to keep a journal (2017)

#112

Post by Thorentis »

solarkraft wrote: post #98
greymalik wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you suggest any in particular?

I don't have much experiences with them (flat text files aren't my style), but a friend seems happy with Joplin. A HN search illustrates the amount of markdown note apps available: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Joplin would be perfect if it allowed quick inter-note linking. Obsidian and Zettlr seem to do this much better. But for journaling I love Joplin.

Re: The more senior your job title, the more you need to keep a journal (2017)

#113

Post by Linell »

jakecopp wrote: post #103
ironchef wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do the same-ish thing. Main highlights on mine: 1) I start off the day with things I should be working on (samesies) 2) I use ### to demarcate different "working sessions" ... one for each meeting, etc. 3) I struggle with finding something that lets me: encrypt, search, big notes, and use multi platform easily :( Closest I've found was google keep so far .. but i hate relying on it like that. I'm pretty sure "somet…

Vimwiki works great for this! Hyperlinks and diary management, all plain text and able to be opened in anything.

I can second using Vimwiki! I have mine set up to automatically sync with Gitlab every so often too, so it’s automatically backed up.

Re: The more senior your job title, the more you need to keep a journal (2017)

#115

Post by Linell »

greymalik wrote: post #31
solarkraft wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many markdown based journal programs, some with encryption. Do these not work for you?

Can you suggest any in particular?

If you’re a Vim user, Vimwiki is awesome:

- https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki

- https://thelinell.com/using-vimwiki/

Re: The more senior your job title, the more you need to keep a journal (2017)

#116

Post by ldavison »

Linell wrote: post #113
jakecopp wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vimwiki works great for this! Hyperlinks and diary management, all plain text and able to be opened in anything.

I can second using Vimwiki! I have mine set up to automatically sync with Gitlab every so often too, so it’s automatically backed up.

I use https://github.com/gitwatch/gitwatch to do this.

I'm curious if there is something you are using on mobile for vimwiki? I've been using termux on Android, which works well enough.

Re: The more senior your job title, the more you need to keep a journal (2017)

#117

Post by AlexCoventry »

OJFord wrote: post #37
elric wrote: post #6

I'm a software engineer, and I've been keeping a "lab journal" on and off for the past decade or so. A single markdown file per day, with the date as filename. First thing I do every day is copy the previous day's entry, give it a once over & remove what's no longer relevant. This helps me remember what I've been working on, and it's a track record of sorts. There's a todo list at the top of each day's entry. But the…

> I'm a software engineer, and I've been keeping a "lab journal" on and off for the past decade or so. I studied (a mix of EE/CS) in the EE dept., and we were actually taught to do keep such notebooks/journals, as in electronics labs were assessed on what the contents of your lab book, not on what you'd produced or measured (or at least not 'hey lab assistant look at my 'scope, see, done it' - obviously measurements…

You can use git to do it in a way that's fairly natural for software development.

Re: The more senior your job title, the more you need to keep a journal (2017)

#118

Post by nitrogen »

paulcole wrote: post #58
gorgoiler wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paper logs are critical for ideas. One just cannot be as expressive in markdown as one can be on a blank dotted-grid page and a pen-pot of Tombow double ended brush pens and Pilot V5s. Anything important can be digested into markdown, but with a note to the journal page where the magic actually happened. (It’s too bad that magic usually turns out to be gibberish thought spam.)

> One just cannot be as expressive in markdown as one can be on a blank dotted-grid page and a pen-pot of Tombow double ended brush pens and Pilot V5s. Counterpoint: Yes they can. There’s this weird fetishization about paper notebooks. It’s like the people who say that vinyl is unequivocally better (it’s not). For some people the end result of digital notes is vastly superior to anything they can scribble in a notebo…

Do you have a good system for drawing diagrams and plotting graphs in Markdown? Maybe some hybrid of dot, octave, and latex?

Re: The more senior your job title, the more you need to keep a journal (2017)

#119

Post by Linell »

ldavison wrote: post #116
Linell wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can second using Vimwiki! I have mine set up to automatically sync with Gitlab every so often too, so it’s automatically backed up.

I use https://github.com/gitwatch/gitwatch to do this. I'm curious if there is something you are using on mobile for vimwiki? I've been using termux on Android, which works well enough.

Sadly I don’t have a solution for mobile. The truth is that I mostly use it on the computer though so it really hasn’t been a problem.

My backup method is pretty simple but it’s been silently chugging along for months now without a single hiccup. It’s just a git commit via cron job: https://thelinell.com/using-vimwiki/

Re: The more senior your job title, the more you need to keep a journal (2017)

#120

Post by kseifried »

File a ticket. I file so many tickets for work I do. Sometimes after the fact ("oh... they'll wonder why I ..."). A journal is good, but using whatever institutionalized knowledge system your company relies upon (usually some form of ticketing and documentation system). The tickets are good for timelines/notes, and if they need to become something recurring, that's when you document it.
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