28 ms·

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

8fingerlouie 6y ago
As someone who "recently" (couple of years or more) switched from "senior developer" to architect and at the same time got handed responsibility for 5-10 independent software systems, i completely agree. Before this switch i would default to using memory. It was easy, it worked, and i have a rather good memory. Most things worth remembering somehow just "sticks" without any mnemonics. After the switch, i got 10x the information i used to get before, and while i initially settled on using my inbox as a "todo list", flagging items that needed attention, this also became rather inefficient after a while. I started keeping a journal. Every meeting i go to, i jot down notes, every agreement is written down. I still keep my todo list, but it's in Emacs org-mode now. Notes are handwritten. As the author also hints, handwriting helps commit things to memory, so the times i actually consult my notes are rather rare. Instead, by simply having written them down, my brain somehow accepts that "it's under control", and focuses on something else, but still remembers it.
- GlennS 6y ago
  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.
  - permalac 6y ago
    How do you find time for that?
    - throwanem 6y ago
      I do the same, and transcribing notes doesn't take all that long. You tend to summarize in the process, so it's not usually a 1:1 copy. I also put references to my (page-numbered) paper notebooks in my notes file, and vice versa, so stuff that would be very long to transcribe doesn't usually have to be transcribed at all.
    - dijit 6y ago
      In the words of the Merovingian: "Yes, of course. Who has time? Who has time? But then if we never take time, how can we ever have time?"
    - taude 6y ago
      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.
    - GlennS 6y ago
      I guess I prioritize it over other things which I would otherwise be spending the time on. You might just be a more busy person than me? I also have a pretty strong aversion to headless-chicken-mode, having seen it as a pathological disaster spiral at a couple of places where everything is urgent all the time, and so you never have time for anything. Being in too much of a rush to do things properly is a trap. I find as an employee I have to fill and empty my head a lot. I have a good short-term memory, but things that I don't write down tend to slip out after a week or two. "Oh, I worked on that thing? I don't remember that."
  - linker3000 6y ago
    I was taught some 30 years ago that best practise is to write clear contemporary notes because transcribing them later can lead to self-censorship, deciding to omit what might seem irrelevant at the (new) time, but subsequently becomes important, or incorrect re-interpretation.
    - kevstev 6y ago
      I am not sure I follow this line of thinking? You are saying that after the fact you somehow understand the context less than you did at the time of initial writing? I find the absolute opposite to be true- At the time of the lecture or meeting or whatever, I am just trying to capture everything. What is truly important and what is noise is not clear to me at that point. Also in the beginning stages of a class or project certain concepts or decisions seem very new or foreign, and a few months later they are deeply ingrained and no more likely to be forgotten than understanding what gravity is. By far the most successful study technique I have ever used is recopying my initial notes. The second set is much more coherent, organized, and focused on the tricky bits while removing things that I thought might be important at the time but ended up not being important. I think someone did you a major disservice 30 years ago.
    - GlennS 6y ago
      This is an interesting idea, and I will chew on it for a bit. I'm not sure how I would achieve it though? The right initial structure isn't usually clear at the beginning of a conversation/research session/whatever I am taking notes on.
mgkimsal 6y ago
Not specifically because of job title, but I've found that I've tended to keep notes during the first few weeks/months of any new job/engagement. There are always curveballs and stressful moments, and writing them down has helped me calm down a bit and 'step back' from the situation (not a lot, but it helps some). I am not diligent/daily about it, nor do I keep it up for more than few months at the most, but as another tool to keep notes while getting to know people, it helps to be able to double check my recollection of their behavior, our interactions, etc outside of whatever corporate note-taking system is in place.
mister_hn 6y ago
Isn't it also because of ageing?
- OliverM 6y ago
  No. I've had an excellent memory all my life and I have noticed it's not quite the reliable cache for everything important that it used to be. But the journalling the article discusses is a process to condense learnings and reveal insights much more effectively than just idly reviewing your memory of the day's events mentally.
- munchbunny 6y ago
  You mean losing memory over time? Not in my case. I switched from doing things in memory to keeping a notebook at the ripe old age of 24. For two reasons. The first is that I simply couldn't hold everything in my head anymore because I had to track 5-10 different projects at any time, and context switching without something written down sucks when you have to context switch multiple times a day. The second is that writing things down was a great way to force myself to clarify my thinking. I became more articulate across the board, not because I got better at bullshitting, but because I was now reserving time in advance to think through open issues in a structured way.
  - mister_hn 6y ago
    But with age come more responsibility and stuff to take care of.
zigzaggy 6y ago
This is a great idea / application for writing. Last year I took a senior manager position at a fairly large company. I am also building a side project (not competing, totally unrelated). Between those 2 things my mind is constantly full. I depend on my project plan to move through time / between tasks. But I still depend on my memory and a high volume of unstructured notes to move through small increments of time. You simply can’t plan every single sub task. I have noticed when things get really busy and I start getting tired, everything around me speeds up. I really like the idea in this article that writing a journal by hand slows life down. I’m going to try structured journaling. This year’s Big Project is about to go live, and I need a way to slow it all down for a few minutes each day.
elric 6y ago
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 rest is mostly free-form. Some days don't contain anything. Others contain meeting notes. Design ideas. Results of experiments. It's all plain text, so it's easily grep-able. Sometimes I look back at them to answer "why did I do that"-type questions. Sometimes $manager wonders what I've been working on or why it's taking so much time. I can just point at the journal and say "I've been doing 3 meetings every day and I've been onboarding people so I haven't had time to work on XYZ". It's not much effort. And imho it's definitely worth it.
- ironchef 6y ago
  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 "something" plus encrypted sqlite will work once i find it. 4) I name it Today.YYYYMMDD ... I'm trying to get into the habit of retroing once a month, creating a Month.YYYYMMDD to try to be more reflective and understand high level impact I had and systemic issues I'm running into. The number of times this has saved me time figuring out "Oh .. i saw that error before .. how did I fix it?" and "who did i talk to about X and what did they say" months to years later has proven to be super helpful and I will be continuing indefinitely.
  - solarkraft 6y ago
    There are many markdown based journal programs, some with encryption. Do these not work for you?
    - greymalik 6y ago
lnsru 6y ago
Independently of the title I suggest keeping private employment journal. I had so many situations when one wanted to do scapegoat out of me. But I had meeting notes made few months/years ago and could defend myself very well. Of course, there is this productivity topic too, but I treat it as a secondary benefit.
flyinglizard 6y ago
A large whiteboard in my home office, on wheels. Two sided, one is blank for brainstorming, the other always full of things I have up in the air. Some lines remain there for months, some for days, until the subject is done. I use the blank side during calls to jot down notes which I transform into meeting summaries and email later. Then I clear it. I find whiteboard writing very satisfying and the the fact it’s always out there in the room with you - can’t minimize it or just not open it - keeps you always synced to your tasks. Space is limited so it’s always relevant. You’re at some point forced to take care of things to make room for new things - can’t scroll down.
joe8756438 6y ago
Keeping a journal is important to anybody trying to realize something new. There are tons of senior positions that don’t require a lot of creativity. And there are tons of low level positions that do. Habit is the main journaling challenge, a fact barely touched in the article. There are two habits that need developing simultaneously: taking notes and reviewing notes. It’s true that simply writing something down leads to better recall, but that’s not what the article is about. The article is about creativity. To make something based on your past observations you have to review and synthesize. That skill is much different than taking notes to remember stuff. I agree with the author that there is nothing better than pen and paper. But There are scenarios where all I have is my phone and I still want to take notes. This leads to another can of worms: how to organize all the notes you generate on a daily basis. I built a general purpose note-taking tool [0] to help me develop the habit of taking and reviewing notes. It has also become my repository of snippets of information generated from my phone. I use the snippets I create to inform writing I do elsewhere: documents, outlines, letters, etc. [0]. https://www.tatatap.com https://www.tatatap.com
- OJFord 6y ago
  Tatatap looks like a really nice straight-forward/utilitarian tool, thanks! As an aside, as someone interested in building similar (focused on solving one problem hopefully well) tools and earning some modest income from them, would you mind sharing (roughly) what your distribution of free/paid users looks like?
  - joe8756438 6y ago
    Around 3%. There are people that use it a lot and the rest aren't that engaged.
    - murphm8 6y ago
      Taptap looks really cool and I would like to use it, unfortunately my workplace doesn't allow 3rd parties to store the information that would be in my notes. Have you thought about a self-hosted version?
prepend 6y ago
I still use paper as I find the act of writing down is more useful than search. About once a year I dig into my stack of pocket paper moleskine notebooks to look something up. I make entries for each meeting, date, participant, notes, incoming and outgoing tasks. Also adding in sketches, designs, and other stuff that I wanted to write when I didn’t have a computer near. I started this because I found having a laptop or phone out during a discussion with someone off putting. People would open up if I was jotting small notes but would not if I had a laptop open. I can keep the notebook in my front pocket. Started out with hardcover moleskines but am not trying out rhodia, leuchtturm, and others. Each one lasts about 3 months and I have a stack 4 feet high so probably 10 years or so.
- Sisouse 6y ago
  I use paper for the short (fast) 'news' with a size as 'big' as a business card -but the note has to fit the sheet of paper - and digital notes for storing all the collected stuff... since one of the notes became osbsolete. Actually having 5 lying in front of me, 5 ideas (remarkable in my opinion) One sayin: "Cumulative acting 'deductive'"? P-: Somebody told me: 'Fine, than I am now able to shred all my documents, conserve a digital copy and further taking only small sheets of notes.' > dear But... ^^
- gorgoiler 6y ago
  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.)
  - OldHand2018 6y ago
    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 https://velasciences.com
noir_lord 6y ago
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.
- HoustonDad 6y ago
  I've been doing this by hand for years, and never knew about this plugin. Thank you for making me find it, it's going to be super useful! vscode-journal, for those who are interested
- greymalik 6y ago
  Do you know the name of the plugin?
  - noir_lord 6y ago
    Vscode-journal and vscode-journal-view I think, not at my PC.
hprotagonist 6y ago
My title’s never gotten higher than “research scientist”, and i’ve more or less fastidiously kept a lab notebook for as long as i’ve been working. For the past several years it’s been in the form of a git repo of text files, more or less by date append only. I can’t imagine not having one now.
ahmedbaracat 6y ago
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?
- jagraff 6y ago
  I use the Remarkable. I love it for marking up documents and writing brief notes/sketches. Also (you may already know this if you've researched it) it exposes ssh and you can get root, so you can pretty much put any program you want on it. I've used https://github.com/canselcik/libremarkable https://github.com/canselcik/libremarkable to write some basic apps for it. One thing I'll note is that the hand-writing -> text converter never really worked that well for me. I have messy handwriting so YMMV. I would still recommend it, but if that's the killer feature for you it's something to keep in mind
  - ikornaselur 6y ago
    It's good to see someone mention they use it and they're happy with it. The aggressive marketing they do kind of puts me off, coupled with the fact that they just released the ReMarkable recently and are already taking pre-orders for the version 2 later this year? I've been thinking about getting an iPad to take notes on, but I see the ReMarkable tablet pop up all the time (thanks to their marketing, I guess it's working), have you tried taking notes on something else? I'm mainly just thinking that if I'm getting a tablet for notes, should I get one that's practically _only_ for taking notes (ReMarkable) or one that has much more functionality (iPad). I guess that also depends a little bit on the "syncability", does the ReMarkable have integrations to sync notes and documents to third party services or do they roll their own thing?
  - claytonjy 6y ago
    I'll second this; I love mine, but have written off OCR and searchability completely. I bought it to be an e-reader, but ended up taking a ton of notes in it. I have notebooks for projects, for recurring meetings, a single-page "task list" and a page-per-week notebook tracking what I plan to do, what I did, and what I learned, which I use to inform my part of weekly standup meetings. I prefer to keep most notes ephemeral; if it matters, I should be transcribing it elsewhere (preferably to something typed; I have some shame about my handwriting quality). I do keep all past weeks of my standup notes, and I expect to draw on them heavily to inform performance reviews and promotions, but I can go through them in order, so even there searchability is not a big loss.
redorb 6y ago
I've been using oneNote for about 10 years now at work, one page per week.. the ability to search is really helpful. OneNote is also now free.
stuff4ben 6y ago
I've been using Apple Notes for the past several years. I create a folder for the team I'm on and then a new note for a new project or task I'm working on at the moment. Search works pretty well and it automatically saves and syncs with my phone. I also maintain a TODO note that I update with what I'm working on, usually on a daily basis, and things I need to look at. I used to use Evernote, but it got unwieldy and Apple Notes did everything I needed it to.
tweetle_beetle 6y ago
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 important, but six people leaving a meeting with their own accounts of what happened is almost worse than no account. Wherefore art thou minute takers? Once that is in place, then many of the comments in this thread about needing personal notes to remind them about what to do and when, or what the team agreed to do next, surely are no longer necessary? When everyone can rely on that, then by all means keep personal meta-meeting notes about emotional response, etc. for reflection. I think that's something I would like to work on.
- prepend 6y ago
  I’ve tried that but find the minutes have too much and too little. They do help me mix in my own notes. I’ve experimented with having a meeting wiki where everyone keeps notes in a single file, that was pretty good. But suffers from “open laptop syndrome.” I heard someone suggest, and want to try, assigning the note taker at the end of the meeting. I’m not sure if it’s cruelty:effectiveness ratio may be too high.
  - dragontamer 6y ago
    For now, I simply email my notes to everyone each meeting. According to Roberts Rules, the #1 order of every meeting is everyone agreeing that the previous meeting notes are correct. Only after the previous meeting's minutes are finalized do you proceed with the current meeting. ---------- A surprising number of people do not know how to run meetings. As such, most meetings wander off unfocused. And since most people fail to solidify meeting notes, action items from previous meetings are "lost". It takes work to ensure that meetings are worthwhile. And very, very few people seem to know the secrets (despite them being very obvious and well documented).
- alexpotato 6y ago
  This has the added benefit of: - creating a short recap of what happened - the above recap can also be shared with team members who couldn't attend (e.g. home sick or APAC based) The latter has been incredibly useful during COVID specifically and for remote management in general.
euix 6y ago
I use a combination of sending myself emails and the Calendar system in outlook.
JTbane 6y ago
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.
- fapjacks 6y ago
  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.
dragontamer 6y ago
Hmmm... the most important "paper skill" at my work is learning to "promote" papers across the tiers of journals. 1. Loose-paper and Whiteboards -- Sketches and concepts that rarely last longer than 5 minutes before being erased or trashed. 2. Short-term journal -- When a concept needs to stick with me for 1-day or so, I write it down into my short-term journal. This is a tiny Field Notes journal I keep in my pocket, always accessible. This journal is extremely tiny, and thrown away on a regular basis (Well... more like thrown into a bin. I don't think I've re-read any of my old ones, but I do keep them just in case). I rarely visit anything aside from the most recent 3 or 4 pages. 3. Long-term journal -- Some concepts need to stick with me for more than a day. These I copy into my long-term journal. Anything in the Long-term journal is indexed... yes, documenting your documentation. If its important enough to be long-term archived, its important enough to be thoughtfully organized and categorized for quick recall. I suggest a journal with multiple bookmarks and pre-numbered pages, such as the Leuchtturm1917. My first "long term journal" was a standard $1 80-page spiral notebook. If you manually number all the pages, then you're going to be well organized. Once you're familiar with an organizational scheme, upgrade to a Leuchtturm. (Moleskins don't have numbered pages...). Some people prefer dates instead of numbers: it really depends on what organizational scheme works for you. 4. Team Activity -- Anything requiring coordination with others becomes a team event. Usually an email, but it could be a note on a desk, or a message left on their whiteboard. Or a formal Jira issue ticket. --------- The important thing to note is the hierarchy... from ephemeral whiteboard all the way up to formal team coordination. Generally speaking, your notes should traverse the tiers up and down as needed. This means copying notes over-and-over. As computer wizards, we are often familiar with the computer automatically copying our work for us. In the paper world, you must copy notes manually. Despite its tedium, copying notes from one tier to another is extremely important. Writing a note directly into your long-term journal probably means getting the concept wrong. You should get a first-draft figured out somewhere else first (whiteboards). Or, maybe a concept isn't "deserving" of a slot in your long-term journal yet. Keeping it in your short-term journal first helps "reduce the noise" found in your long term journal. Even if you know something is important enough for the long-term journal, keeping it in the short-term journal first can help you figure out how to properly organize it. Finally: Copying notes within the tiers is a form of meditation that helps solidify and memorize ideas. If something is truly important enough to traverse the tiers of organization, then its probably something you want to store into brain-space. ------- Teammate communication is simply another tier. You definitely want to get your thoughts and concepts figured out before communicating.
SamuelAdams 6y ago
Highly recommend reading the book "The Cuckoo's Egg" by Cliff Stoll. This book started as a journal by Cliff when he worked at Berkeley Labs in the late 80's. He was an astronomer-turned-IT, and in science I guess they are just in the habit of writing things down. A few months and teletraces later his journal was thick enough to publish into a book, so he did exactly that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg
- HeyLaughingBoy 6y ago
  When my dev team started at a company that was basically run by biochemists (we were all hired to start up a specific product), they gave us all really nice lab notebooks, I guess out of habit. Ten years later, I had used about 5 pages of mine. My two teammates wrote more, but none of us went past page 50 or so. OTOH, the scientists we worked with had gone through multiple books by that time. It's not an easy habit to get into.
  - asdff 6y ago
    Lab notebooks can be important for patent purposes. No surprise the chemists are meticulous.
- vodkaPong 6y ago
  I really enjoyed reading this book too. It's an interesting story about finding a hacker and Cliff has a great writing style.
linker3000 6y ago
Something that I didn't see called out in the article is who owns your journal. Very likely, if you write down notes about work-related activities they are the property of the business. So, who has physical journals from current and previous jobs at home, and how many people have electronic ones on systems other than corporate approved/internal ones!? I'm not judging, just saying!
lukethomas 6y ago
My journaling habit started with Ohlife.com way back in 2014. I found the idea of quickly recapping my week to be therapeutic., plus it was great to see entries over time. I ended up building a product (https://www.friday.app/ https://www.friday.app/) to make this easy and automated. While it's built for teams to share updates and reflect (think weekly updates, retros, etc), there's "single-player" mode available too. I like the digital journal format because I could never start the habit with paper. The automated reminders were critical to establish the habit. I still keep a regular notebook where I'll document thoughts, but it's more ephemeral.
Aperocky 6y ago
Shameless plug: https://github.com/Aperocky/termlife/blob/master/diaryman.sh https://github.com/Aperocky/termlife/blob/master/diaryman.sh This is how I get to keep journal, by having it as a 5 letter command in the terminal.
revicon 6y ago
A while back I fell out of love with Evernote and migrated all my years of notes out to txt files which are synced to Dropbox. Huge nested folder structures but easily searched via grep or whatever. And then I have a folder called “Captains Log” and I make txt files for as many things as I can during the day. Code snippets, reminders to buy eggs at the store, urls to some dumb thing I want to remember to read later on but can’t bother with right now. Often the only content of the txt file is the title and no content if it was just a quick jot. And now you can use the Dropbox app edit txt files directly inside it which makes for easy note taking when mobile. Been using this method for years now, still going strong.
teepo 6y ago
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)
fastasucan 6y ago
I just want to recommend https://jrnl.sh/ https://jrnl.sh/ which is a neat little terminal tool for keeping journals. I am sure most here could built it them-self over the weekend, but why reinvent the wheel. It works great with tags, dates (both displaying journal entries from date or date ranges and making an entry for a date or a time "yesterday"). It also support encryption and has a wide range of export options. Funnily enough I actually love notebooks, but I cannot for the death of me keep a neat and nice design when keeping notes using a physical notebook, which means that I loose all motivation. However, having a minimalist tool like jrnl helps me to actually write, not just collect blank notebooks.
Icedcool 6y ago
Great Article on journaling.
arminiusreturns 6y ago
I have to say that when I was working in biosciences I did this and it was very helpful for me and I'm sure for my successor, but the culture of working around scientists was more conducive of it and I find the corporate world less open to it or more likely to use it in ways it shouldn't be, so I've not been doing it. At the time I was using raw yaml, but eventually transitioned to emacs org-mode. I still do it personally and find it invaluable. I still heavily use moleskins, but regularly sit down to transcibe them into digital form, but don't throw the physical notebooks away, just in case.
_AzMoo 6y ago
It's worth noting that journals can and will be subpoenaed as evidence during civil cases in certain jurisdictions. If you don't want something coming out in a court then don't put it in your journal.
kseifried 6y ago
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.
ulisesrmzroche 6y ago
I got a 5 dollar Wordpress droplet on digital ocean for my work journal. I also use it to keep up with Wordpress, even tho I don’t actually extend it The most feature thing for me is I can use my tablet. Dealbreaker otherwise. I’ve been looking at Notion but their iPad app was trash last time I used it Besides don’t hunch and don’t get fat, “keep a journal” is what I would tell my younger self
znpy 6y ago
On Linux, i use rednotebook for that. It started as a simple Todo/done log, but then I started using for notes and general scratchpad.

As someone who "recently" (couple of years or more) switched from "senior developer" to architect and at the same time got handed responsibility for 5-10 independent software systems, i completely agree. Before this switch i would default to using memory. It was easy, it worked, and i have a rather good memory. Most things worth remembering somehow just "sticks" without any mnemonics. After the switch, i got 10x the information i used to get before, and while i initially settled on using my inbox as a "todo list", flagging items that needed attention, this also became rather inefficient after a while. I started keeping a journal. Every meeting i go to, i jot down notes, every agreement is written down. I still keep my todo list, but it's in Emacs org-mode now. Notes are handwritten. As the author also hints, handwriting helps commit things to memory, so the times i actually consult my notes are rather rare. Instead, by simply having written them down, my brain somehow accepts that "it's under control", and focuses on something else, but still remembers it.

GlennS 6y ago
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.
- permalac 6y ago
  How do you find time for that?
  - throwanem 6y ago
    I do the same, and transcribing notes doesn't take all that long. You tend to summarize in the process, so it's not usually a 1:1 copy. I also put references to my (page-numbered) paper notebooks in my notes file, and vice versa, so stuff that would be very long to transcribe doesn't usually have to be transcribed at all.
  - dijit 6y ago
    In the words of the Merovingian: "Yes, of course. Who has time? Who has time? But then if we never take time, how can we ever have time?"
  - taude 6y ago
    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.
  - GlennS 6y ago
    I guess I prioritize it over other things which I would otherwise be spending the time on. You might just be a more busy person than me? I also have a pretty strong aversion to headless-chicken-mode, having seen it as a pathological disaster spiral at a couple of places where everything is urgent all the time, and so you never have time for anything. Being in too much of a rush to do things properly is a trap. I find as an employee I have to fill and empty my head a lot. I have a good short-term memory, but things that I don't write down tend to slip out after a week or two. "Oh, I worked on that thing? I don't remember that."
- linker3000 6y ago
  I was taught some 30 years ago that best practise is to write clear contemporary notes because transcribing them later can lead to self-censorship, deciding to omit what might seem irrelevant at the (new) time, but subsequently becomes important, or incorrect re-interpretation.
  - kevstev 6y ago
    I am not sure I follow this line of thinking? You are saying that after the fact you somehow understand the context less than you did at the time of initial writing? I find the absolute opposite to be true- At the time of the lecture or meeting or whatever, I am just trying to capture everything. What is truly important and what is noise is not clear to me at that point. Also in the beginning stages of a class or project certain concepts or decisions seem very new or foreign, and a few months later they are deeply ingrained and no more likely to be forgotten than understanding what gravity is. By far the most successful study technique I have ever used is recopying my initial notes. The second set is much more coherent, organized, and focused on the tricky bits while removing things that I thought might be important at the time but ended up not being important. I think someone did you a major disservice 30 years ago.
  - GlennS 6y ago
    This is an interesting idea, and I will chew on it for a bit. I'm not sure how I would achieve it though? The right initial structure isn't usually clear at the beginning of a conversation/research session/whatever I am taking notes on.

mgkimsal 6y ago

Not specifically because of job title, but I've found that I've tended to keep notes during the first few weeks/months of any new job/engagement. There are always curveballs and stressful moments, and writing them down has helped me calm down a bit and 'step back' from the situation (not a lot, but it helps some). I am not diligent/daily about it, nor do I keep it up for more than few months at the most, but as another tool to keep notes while getting to know people, it helps to be able to double check my recollection of their behavior, our interactions, etc outside of whatever corporate note-taking system is in place.

mister_hn 6y ago

Isn't it also because of ageing?

OliverM 6y ago
No. I've had an excellent memory all my life and I have noticed it's not quite the reliable cache for everything important that it used to be. But the journalling the article discusses is a process to condense learnings and reveal insights much more effectively than just idly reviewing your memory of the day's events mentally.
munchbunny 6y ago
You mean losing memory over time? Not in my case. I switched from doing things in memory to keeping a notebook at the ripe old age of 24. For two reasons. The first is that I simply couldn't hold everything in my head anymore because I had to track 5-10 different projects at any time, and context switching without something written down sucks when you have to context switch multiple times a day. The second is that writing things down was a great way to force myself to clarify my thinking. I became more articulate across the board, not because I got better at bullshitting, but because I was now reserving time in advance to think through open issues in a structured way.
- mister_hn 6y ago
  But with age come more responsibility and stuff to take care of.

zigzaggy 6y ago

This is a great idea / application for writing. Last year I took a senior manager position at a fairly large company. I am also building a side project (not competing, totally unrelated). Between those 2 things my mind is constantly full. I depend on my project plan to move through time / between tasks. But I still depend on my memory and a high volume of unstructured notes to move through small increments of time. You simply can’t plan every single sub task. I have noticed when things get really busy and I start getting tired, everything around me speeds up. I really like the idea in this article that writing a journal by hand slows life down. I’m going to try structured journaling. This year’s Big Project is about to go live, and I need a way to slow it all down for a few minutes each day.

elric 6y ago

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 rest is mostly free-form. Some days don't contain anything. Others contain meeting notes. Design ideas. Results of experiments. It's all plain text, so it's easily grep-able. Sometimes I look back at them to answer "why did I do that"-type questions. Sometimes $manager wonders what I've been working on or why it's taking so much time. I can just point at the journal and say "I've been doing 3 meetings every day and I've been onboarding people so I haven't had time to work on XYZ". It's not much effort. And imho it's definitely worth it.

ironchef 6y ago
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 "something" plus encrypted sqlite will work once i find it. 4) I name it Today.YYYYMMDD ... I'm trying to get into the habit of retroing once a month, creating a Month.YYYYMMDD to try to be more reflective and understand high level impact I had and systemic issues I'm running into. The number of times this has saved me time figuring out "Oh .. i saw that error before .. how did I fix it?" and "who did i talk to about X and what did they say" months to years later has proven to be super helpful and I will be continuing indefinitely.
- solarkraft 6y ago
  There are many markdown based journal programs, some with encryption. Do these not work for you?
  - greymalik 6y ago

lnsru 6y ago

Independently of the title I suggest keeping private employment journal. I had so many situations when one wanted to do scapegoat out of me. But I had meeting notes made few months/years ago and could defend myself very well. Of course, there is this productivity topic too, but I treat it as a secondary benefit.

flyinglizard 6y ago

A large whiteboard in my home office, on wheels. Two sided, one is blank for brainstorming, the other always full of things I have up in the air. Some lines remain there for months, some for days, until the subject is done. I use the blank side during calls to jot down notes which I transform into meeting summaries and email later. Then I clear it. I find whiteboard writing very satisfying and the the fact it’s always out there in the room with you - can’t minimize it or just not open it - keeps you always synced to your tasks. Space is limited so it’s always relevant. You’re at some point forced to take care of things to make room for new things - can’t scroll down.

joe8756438 6y ago

Keeping a journal is important to anybody trying to realize something new. There are tons of senior positions that don’t require a lot of creativity. And there are tons of low level positions that do. Habit is the main journaling challenge, a fact barely touched in the article. There are two habits that need developing simultaneously: taking notes and reviewing notes. It’s true that simply writing something down leads to better recall, but that’s not what the article is about. The article is about creativity. To make something based on your past observations you have to review and synthesize. That skill is much different than taking notes to remember stuff. I agree with the author that there is nothing better than pen and paper. But There are scenarios where all I have is my phone and I still want to take notes. This leads to another can of worms: how to organize all the notes you generate on a daily basis. I built a general purpose note-taking tool [0] to help me develop the habit of taking and reviewing notes. It has also become my repository of snippets of information generated from my phone. I use the snippets I create to inform writing I do elsewhere: documents, outlines, letters, etc. [0]. https://www.tatatap.com https://www.tatatap.com

OJFord 6y ago
Tatatap looks like a really nice straight-forward/utilitarian tool, thanks! As an aside, as someone interested in building similar (focused on solving one problem hopefully well) tools and earning some modest income from them, would you mind sharing (roughly) what your distribution of free/paid users looks like?
- joe8756438 6y ago
  Around 3%. There are people that use it a lot and the rest aren't that engaged.
  - murphm8 6y ago
    Taptap looks really cool and I would like to use it, unfortunately my workplace doesn't allow 3rd parties to store the information that would be in my notes. Have you thought about a self-hosted version?

prepend 6y ago

I still use paper as I find the act of writing down is more useful than search. About once a year I dig into my stack of pocket paper moleskine notebooks to look something up. I make entries for each meeting, date, participant, notes, incoming and outgoing tasks. Also adding in sketches, designs, and other stuff that I wanted to write when I didn’t have a computer near. I started this because I found having a laptop or phone out during a discussion with someone off putting. People would open up if I was jotting small notes but would not if I had a laptop open. I can keep the notebook in my front pocket. Started out with hardcover moleskines but am not trying out rhodia, leuchtturm, and others. Each one lasts about 3 months and I have a stack 4 feet high so probably 10 years or so.

Sisouse 6y ago
I use paper for the short (fast) 'news' with a size as 'big' as a business card -but the note has to fit the sheet of paper - and digital notes for storing all the collected stuff... since one of the notes became osbsolete. Actually having 5 lying in front of me, 5 ideas (remarkable in my opinion) One sayin: "Cumulative acting 'deductive'"? P-: Somebody told me: 'Fine, than I am now able to shred all my documents, conserve a digital copy and further taking only small sheets of notes.' > dear But... ^^
gorgoiler 6y ago
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.)
- OldHand2018 6y ago
  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 https://velasciences.com

noir_lord 6y ago

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.

HoustonDad 6y ago
I've been doing this by hand for years, and never knew about this plugin. Thank you for making me find it, it's going to be super useful! vscode-journal, for those who are interested
greymalik 6y ago
Do you know the name of the plugin?
- noir_lord 6y ago
  Vscode-journal and vscode-journal-view I think, not at my PC.

hprotagonist 6y ago

My title’s never gotten higher than “research scientist”, and i’ve more or less fastidiously kept a lab notebook for as long as i’ve been working. For the past several years it’s been in the form of a git repo of text files, more or less by date append only. I can’t imagine not having one now.

ahmedbaracat 6y ago

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?

jagraff 6y ago
I use the Remarkable. I love it for marking up documents and writing brief notes/sketches. Also (you may already know this if you've researched it) it exposes ssh and you can get root, so you can pretty much put any program you want on it. I've used https://github.com/canselcik/libremarkable https://github.com/canselcik/libremarkable to write some basic apps for it. One thing I'll note is that the hand-writing -> text converter never really worked that well for me. I have messy handwriting so YMMV. I would still recommend it, but if that's the killer feature for you it's something to keep in mind
- ikornaselur 6y ago
  It's good to see someone mention they use it and they're happy with it. The aggressive marketing they do kind of puts me off, coupled with the fact that they just released the ReMarkable recently and are already taking pre-orders for the version 2 later this year? I've been thinking about getting an iPad to take notes on, but I see the ReMarkable tablet pop up all the time (thanks to their marketing, I guess it's working), have you tried taking notes on something else? I'm mainly just thinking that if I'm getting a tablet for notes, should I get one that's practically _only_ for taking notes (ReMarkable) or one that has much more functionality (iPad). I guess that also depends a little bit on the "syncability", does the ReMarkable have integrations to sync notes and documents to third party services or do they roll their own thing?
- claytonjy 6y ago
  I'll second this; I love mine, but have written off OCR and searchability completely. I bought it to be an e-reader, but ended up taking a ton of notes in it. I have notebooks for projects, for recurring meetings, a single-page "task list" and a page-per-week notebook tracking what I plan to do, what I did, and what I learned, which I use to inform my part of weekly standup meetings. I prefer to keep most notes ephemeral; if it matters, I should be transcribing it elsewhere (preferably to something typed; I have some shame about my handwriting quality). I do keep all past weeks of my standup notes, and I expect to draw on them heavily to inform performance reviews and promotions, but I can go through them in order, so even there searchability is not a big loss.

redorb 6y ago

I've been using oneNote for about 10 years now at work, one page per week.. the ability to search is really helpful. OneNote is also now free.

stuff4ben 6y ago

I've been using Apple Notes for the past several years. I create a folder for the team I'm on and then a new note for a new project or task I'm working on at the moment. Search works pretty well and it automatically saves and syncs with my phone. I also maintain a TODO note that I update with what I'm working on, usually on a daily basis, and things I need to look at. I used to use Evernote, but it got unwieldy and Apple Notes did everything I needed it to.

tweetle_beetle 6y ago

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 important, but six people leaving a meeting with their own accounts of what happened is almost worse than no account. Wherefore art thou minute takers? Once that is in place, then many of the comments in this thread about needing personal notes to remind them about what to do and when, or what the team agreed to do next, surely are no longer necessary? When everyone can rely on that, then by all means keep personal meta-meeting notes about emotional response, etc. for reflection. I think that's something I would like to work on.

prepend 6y ago
I’ve tried that but find the minutes have too much and too little. They do help me mix in my own notes. I’ve experimented with having a meeting wiki where everyone keeps notes in a single file, that was pretty good. But suffers from “open laptop syndrome.” I heard someone suggest, and want to try, assigning the note taker at the end of the meeting. I’m not sure if it’s cruelty:effectiveness ratio may be too high.
- dragontamer 6y ago
  For now, I simply email my notes to everyone each meeting. According to Roberts Rules, the #1 order of every meeting is everyone agreeing that the previous meeting notes are correct. Only after the previous meeting's minutes are finalized do you proceed with the current meeting. ---------- A surprising number of people do not know how to run meetings. As such, most meetings wander off unfocused. And since most people fail to solidify meeting notes, action items from previous meetings are "lost". It takes work to ensure that meetings are worthwhile. And very, very few people seem to know the secrets (despite them being very obvious and well documented).
alexpotato 6y ago
This has the added benefit of: - creating a short recap of what happened - the above recap can also be shared with team members who couldn't attend (e.g. home sick or APAC based) The latter has been incredibly useful during COVID specifically and for remote management in general.

euix 6y ago

I use a combination of sending myself emails and the Calendar system in outlook.

JTbane 6y ago

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.

fapjacks 6y ago
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.

dragontamer 6y ago

Hmmm... the most important "paper skill" at my work is learning to "promote" papers across the tiers of journals. 1. Loose-paper and Whiteboards -- Sketches and concepts that rarely last longer than 5 minutes before being erased or trashed. 2. Short-term journal -- When a concept needs to stick with me for 1-day or so, I write it down into my short-term journal. This is a tiny Field Notes journal I keep in my pocket, always accessible. This journal is extremely tiny, and thrown away on a regular basis (Well... more like thrown into a bin. I don't think I've re-read any of my old ones, but I do keep them just in case). I rarely visit anything aside from the most recent 3 or 4 pages. 3. Long-term journal -- Some concepts need to stick with me for more than a day. These I copy into my long-term journal. Anything in the Long-term journal is indexed... yes, documenting your documentation. If its important enough to be long-term archived, its important enough to be thoughtfully organized and categorized for quick recall. I suggest a journal with multiple bookmarks and pre-numbered pages, such as the Leuchtturm1917. My first "long term journal" was a standard $1 80-page spiral notebook. If you manually number all the pages, then you're going to be well organized. Once you're familiar with an organizational scheme, upgrade to a Leuchtturm. (Moleskins don't have numbered pages...). Some people prefer dates instead of numbers: it really depends on what organizational scheme works for you. 4. Team Activity -- Anything requiring coordination with others becomes a team event. Usually an email, but it could be a note on a desk, or a message left on their whiteboard. Or a formal Jira issue ticket. --------- The important thing to note is the hierarchy... from ephemeral whiteboard all the way up to formal team coordination. Generally speaking, your notes should traverse the tiers up and down as needed. This means copying notes over-and-over. As computer wizards, we are often familiar with the computer automatically copying our work for us. In the paper world, you must copy notes manually. Despite its tedium, copying notes from one tier to another is extremely important. Writing a note directly into your long-term journal probably means getting the concept wrong. You should get a first-draft figured out somewhere else first (whiteboards). Or, maybe a concept isn't "deserving" of a slot in your long-term journal yet. Keeping it in your short-term journal first helps "reduce the noise" found in your long term journal. Even if you know something is important enough for the long-term journal, keeping it in the short-term journal first can help you figure out how to properly organize it. Finally: Copying notes within the tiers is a form of meditation that helps solidify and memorize ideas. If something is truly important enough to traverse the tiers of organization, then its probably something you want to store into brain-space. ------- Teammate communication is simply another tier. You definitely want to get your thoughts and concepts figured out before communicating.

SamuelAdams 6y ago

Highly recommend reading the book "The Cuckoo's Egg" by Cliff Stoll. This book started as a journal by Cliff when he worked at Berkeley Labs in the late 80's. He was an astronomer-turned-IT, and in science I guess they are just in the habit of writing things down. A few months and teletraces later his journal was thick enough to publish into a book, so he did exactly that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg

HeyLaughingBoy 6y ago
When my dev team started at a company that was basically run by biochemists (we were all hired to start up a specific product), they gave us all really nice lab notebooks, I guess out of habit. Ten years later, I had used about 5 pages of mine. My two teammates wrote more, but none of us went past page 50 or so. OTOH, the scientists we worked with had gone through multiple books by that time. It's not an easy habit to get into.
- asdff 6y ago
  Lab notebooks can be important for patent purposes. No surprise the chemists are meticulous.
vodkaPong 6y ago
I really enjoyed reading this book too. It's an interesting story about finding a hacker and Cliff has a great writing style.

linker3000 6y ago

Something that I didn't see called out in the article is who owns your journal. Very likely, if you write down notes about work-related activities they are the property of the business. So, who has physical journals from current and previous jobs at home, and how many people have electronic ones on systems other than corporate approved/internal ones!? I'm not judging, just saying!

lukethomas 6y ago

My journaling habit started with Ohlife.com way back in 2014. I found the idea of quickly recapping my week to be therapeutic., plus it was great to see entries over time. I ended up building a product (https://www.friday.app/ https://www.friday.app/) to make this easy and automated. While it's built for teams to share updates and reflect (think weekly updates, retros, etc), there's "single-player" mode available too. I like the digital journal format because I could never start the habit with paper. The automated reminders were critical to establish the habit. I still keep a regular notebook where I'll document thoughts, but it's more ephemeral.

Aperocky 6y ago

Shameless plug: https://github.com/Aperocky/termlife/blob/master/diaryman.sh https://github.com/Aperocky/termlife/blob/master/diaryman.sh This is how I get to keep journal, by having it as a 5 letter command in the terminal.

revicon 6y ago

A while back I fell out of love with Evernote and migrated all my years of notes out to txt files which are synced to Dropbox. Huge nested folder structures but easily searched via grep or whatever. And then I have a folder called “Captains Log” and I make txt files for as many things as I can during the day. Code snippets, reminders to buy eggs at the store, urls to some dumb thing I want to remember to read later on but can’t bother with right now. Often the only content of the txt file is the title and no content if it was just a quick jot. And now you can use the Dropbox app edit txt files directly inside it which makes for easy note taking when mobile. Been using this method for years now, still going strong.

teepo 6y ago

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)

fastasucan 6y ago

I just want to recommend https://jrnl.sh/ https://jrnl.sh/ which is a neat little terminal tool for keeping journals. I am sure most here could built it them-self over the weekend, but why reinvent the wheel. It works great with tags, dates (both displaying journal entries from date or date ranges and making an entry for a date or a time "yesterday"). It also support encryption and has a wide range of export options. Funnily enough I actually love notebooks, but I cannot for the death of me keep a neat and nice design when keeping notes using a physical notebook, which means that I loose all motivation. However, having a minimalist tool like jrnl helps me to actually write, not just collect blank notebooks.

Icedcool 6y ago

Great Article on journaling.

arminiusreturns 6y ago

I have to say that when I was working in biosciences I did this and it was very helpful for me and I'm sure for my successor, but the culture of working around scientists was more conducive of it and I find the corporate world less open to it or more likely to use it in ways it shouldn't be, so I've not been doing it. At the time I was using raw yaml, but eventually transitioned to emacs org-mode. I still do it personally and find it invaluable. I still heavily use moleskins, but regularly sit down to transcibe them into digital form, but don't throw the physical notebooks away, just in case.

_AzMoo 6y ago

It's worth noting that journals can and will be subpoenaed as evidence during civil cases in certain jurisdictions. If you don't want something coming out in a court then don't put it in your journal.

kseifried 6y ago

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.

ulisesrmzroche 6y ago

I got a 5 dollar Wordpress droplet on digital ocean for my work journal. I also use it to keep up with Wordpress, even tho I don’t actually extend it The most feature thing for me is I can use my tablet. Dealbreaker otherwise. I’ve been looking at Notion but their iPad app was trash last time I used it Besides don’t hunch and don’t get fat, “keep a journal” is what I would tell my younger self

znpy 6y ago

On Linux, i use rednotebook for that. It started as a simple Todo/done log, but then I started using for notes and general scratchpad.