Personal journal aside, I love the benefits of keeping a technical journal. Every day, I have these sections: Today I worked on: Today I figured out / deb

Personal journal aside, I love the benefits of keeping a technical journal. Every day, I have these sections: Today I worked on: Today I figured out / debugged: Problems / Thoughts: Other: I'm fairly lax about not doing it every single day, since it can become a chore or waste space. If it feels like I have nothing of substance to report, I just skip. This is interesting because it helps me introspect about the work I'm doing, whether I should be doing it that way, whether I keep running into similar issues, whether I can fix things systematically, gauge happiness and stress levels, etc. I've returned to this many times and often found it to be super helpful - the information that goes in here is hard-won details, and those are also the kind that are very easy to forget. It also sometimes helps with the "why had I done this this way" questions. Perhaps I do need a personal version of this too.