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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)

#81

Post by taude »

permalac wrote: post #13
GlennS wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For this reason I try to write everything down twice. Once roughly by hand, and then a day or two later tidied up and put on the computer.

How do you find time for that?

I have a personal "shut down" period at the end of the day where I close out my browser tabs that are no longer relevant, and review all the scribbles I've written down in a notebook, transfering the few important ideas to the relevant longterm storage, or to the appropriate project file's todo list, etc.... I also write down the first thing I'm going to do in the morning (because I don't believe the first thing to do should just be "catch up on Slack" or "read email").

Helps me clear my mind, and it saves me a lot of time in the morning, because I can start work and have some wins for the day within 15 minutes...and that momentum carries me through....

Also, the shut-down period is nice, because when I'm tired at the end of the day, it doesn't take a lot of energy.

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

#82

Post by kozziollek »

ironchef wrote: post #9
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 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…

I started using Joplin https://joplinapp.org/ some time ago.

Open-source. Encrypted if you want. Synchronized using WebDAV (also Dropbox, NextCloud and OneDrive). Uses markdown. Has tags. And apps for everything (Windows/macOS/Linux/Android/iOS/terminal).

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

#83

Post by noir_lord »

greymalik wrote: post #33
noir_lord wrote: post #17

Vscode has a nice journal plugin that uses a simple year month day directory structure, has convenient actions like open today, tomorrow and yesterday. Defaults to markdown which is ideal. There is also a nice insert date time plugin so you can time stamp your entries more easily. It's a fluent setup.

Do you know the name of the plugin?

Vscode-journal and vscode-journal-view I think, not at my PC.

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

#84

Post by myu701 »

OldHand2018 wrote: post #56
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.)

I also strongly prefer paper journals. For those of you in the US, checkout Vela [1], a little company in Michigan that makes outstanding journals. The paper is excellent quality for fountain pens and they have many choices for page setup - ruled, grid, dot grid, etc. A little pricy though. [1] https://velasciences.com

My wallet does not like you right now. Good quality hardback journals for 'cheap' (Office Depot prices), and made by a small US-Based company? Sign me up.

EDIT: Does anyone else know of any companies like this for office supplies? Notebooks, pens, inks etc.? I support Noodler's Ink since they are entirely US-based, but even they have some of their pens made in India etc.

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

#85

Post by mpfundstein »

stevekemp wrote: post #72
chris_st wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. I did something slightly simpler: a single file with a per-day section. This helped immensely with quarterly reviews (I'd forget a lot of things I'd accomplished), and REALLY helped when I hit an obscure bug (typically a configuration thing) that I'd seen several months previously.

I'm glad to see I'm not alone! I also had ~/Work.MD stored for the past few years. Each day I add the date as a new top-level heading, and write notes of what I did. I've recently started contracting (and billing hourly) so I've switched to using an org-mode file, which contains commands, links to internal stories, and other things. As I'm contracting I figured I might be asked to justify the hours-billed, etc. So fo…

only share if you have to. and better negotiate on outcomes instead of hours. just a tip :-) took me a while to understand why

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

#86

Post by tristor »

et1337 wrote: post #54
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…

Standard Notes is my Google Keep replacement. Fully encrypted, straightforward business model, works great, apps available on iOS and Android.

Thank you for this suggestion. I hadn't heard of Standard Notes before and had stopped using Evernote in 2016 to switch to just Markdown files on disk w/ Git. I've migrated everything into it and this looks pretty much perfect for what I need (better tag management would be my only ask).

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

#87

Post by fapjacks »

JTbane wrote: post #39

The biggest issue for me as a frontline developer is the backroom decisions that get made by seniors and architecture, that are subsequently poorly documented or communicated. Every meeting should have a TLDR summary of what was accomplished that is shared with everyone that needs to know.

I agree, and maybe to help you out here, I'll suggest that whenever you use the word "should" as in a value judgment, ask yourself what footwork you need to do in order to make it happen. Merely suggesting it as as a value judgment however is not footwork. Fully define the problem and bring them something they can use, and I guarantee it'll facilitate way more than just getting you what you wanted.

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

#88

Post by teepo »

I'm now in technical sales working with clients, meetings, deliverables, etc. I've migrated from paper to Evernote, to emacs, out of emacs, and now journal and take notes in emacs with org-mode and org-roam, and use evernote for reference material. Searching notes is now a snap, and I can trust that my reference material is indexed. I'd like to quit evernote, but the OCR, web clipping, and mobile application are still working well enough for me. (although I do monthly exports from evernote and import _what_I_can_ into emacs and file system)

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

#89

Post by blue_shirt »

ahmedbaracat wrote: post #24

I am considering getting a Remarkable tablet just to be able to have the best of both worlds: hand writing and searching. Has anyone used Remarkable extensively and want to share their experience?

I currently have the remarkable V1 and have used it "extensively" (211 pages in 19 notebooks, plus 10 books like PHB 5e, CISSP guide book, and various other nerd things and white papers). I am super happy with the product as it solved my use case of wanting to keep my notes handwritten yet on my person without having to carry around multiple notebooks. I also love the fact that I can have a notebook that goes from us legal lined paper background to large grid background, and back multiple times.

It's PDF capabilities are fine, and you can write on the pages which is nice, but I've not really tried to access any of these notes outside of the device. The did roll their own cloud sync capabilities though so you can use their apps on devices for that. There's also the 3rd party options that exist for that too.

As mentioned by jagraff they expose ssh and allow you to login as root. The whole device is a linux machine so if you want to setup syncthing to run on it you can[1]. If you want something else like zotero, or google drive, I suggest checking their wiki[2] and the github repos[3] dedicated to curating some of the stuff written for it

TLDR; Super happy with remarkable v1. So happy pre ordered V2. It gives you root on a linux box.

[1]: https://github.com/evidlo/remarkable_syncthing

[2]: https://remarkablewiki.com/tips/start

[3]: https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable

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

#90

Post by gorgoiler »

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…

As far as end results go, obviously My Life And What I Learned Along The Way.pdf is obviously going to win out over a pile of scribbles.

Regarding my original point, it’s what you use to get to the finished product that counts, and I maintain that hacking markdown is inferior to freeform pen and paper thinking.

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