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Keeping a plaintext “did” file

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Re: Keeping a plaintext “did” file

#52

Post by keithpeter »

amelius wrote: post #45

Title should contain "with Vim".

I was confident that people would post other solutions here.

I'm thinking of a bash script that takes a title starts a text file in the folder ~/.plan with filename generated from the title but prepended by date in yyddmmhhmm format. Might get me recording more things.

Like others, I use paper for the doodles and diagrams.

Re: Keeping a plaintext “did” file

#54

Post by hk__2 »

chucksmash wrote: post #29

I've settled on a couple of helper functions in bash to accomplish a similar thing (daily journaling): ####################################### # Normalizes date arguments # Globals: # None # Arguments: # date (defaults to today) # Returns: # string of format 'YYYY-MM-DD' ####################################### function getDate { local DATE=${1:-$(date -I)}; if [[ "${DATE}" =~ [+]+ ]]; then DATE=$(date -I -d" ${DATE}…

Nitpick: here you can use a `case` instead of `if [[ ... ]] elif [[ ... ]] elif ...`:

    case "$DATE" in
      +*|-*)
        DATE=$(date -I -d" $DATE days") ;;
      tomorrow)
        DATE=$(date -I -d" +1 days") ;;
      yesterday)
        DATE=$(date -I -d" -1 days") ;;
    esac

Re: Keeping a plaintext “did” file

#57

Post by divan »

> Its super important to take a second every once in a while to simple write down what you did during the past mental sprint. Writing down what you learned solidifies the knowledge.

Sorry, I didn't get why it's super important. Isn't it a context switch? How does it really help to solidify the knowledge? How often do you review those did files? How exactly reviewing what you did helps? (I'm thinking of myself reading some "did" from the past and fail to see any benefit). How this solution is better than using Notes or Google Keep or whatever online tool? How to manage it across multiple machines and backup it?

If the goal is to solidify knowledge, I can't help but suggest using Anki: there was an article about in HN not so long ago: http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html

Re: Keeping a plaintext “did” file

#58

Post by DanielleMolloy »

http://todotxt.org has a format for a done.txt list, too. Useful before project meetings to get an overview over what you did in the last days.

TodoTxtMac creates this for me: https://mjdescy.github.io/TodoTxtMac/

I've been using it together with Dropbox (for access from my phone) for 3 years now.

Re: Keeping a plaintext “did” file

#59

Post by mitul_45 »

I was using Vimwiki for this stuff for long, but this idea seems promising for a daily journal.

I mostly divide my tasks by day so I don't want timestamp to be added everytime I add an entry. Here's my aliases if it helps:

  alias ndid="nvim +'normal Go' +'r!date' +'normal o' +':exe \"normal i=============================\\"' ~/Dropbox/did.txt"
  alias did="nvim +'normal G' +startinsert ~/Dropbox/did.txt"
So use `n(ew)did` at the start of the day and for every subsequent entries, use `did`. Also using Dropbox as storage for portability.

Re: Keeping a plaintext “did” file

#60

Post by thinkingemote »

ajuc wrote: post #26

Similar but not the same: most days day at work I create one or more txt files in notepad (kate to be exact) where I paste every temporary info while I work on some task. Basically everything that doesn't go to git, and you have to keep somewhere while you're working on it: - nonobvious terminal commands or small scripts I had to write - fixes for enviromental/configuration problems - fragments of stacktraces - fragm…

I have used a Google Doc for this, as it has ability to copy in screenshots. However a large project with lots of stuff makes it lag
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